A caveat: if you don’t yield an inch to this album, it won’t yield an inch to you, and you’ll both just sit there, inert, obstinate, and pissed off. To both the credit and peril of Atlanta quartet Untied States, they haven’t softened their punch one decibel for their fourth LP, and first on Distile. I sure can’t pretend it hasn’t rubbed me the wrong way a few times, but I eventually chalked it up to my own disengagement, because Instant Everything, Constant Nothing is an intense, multifarious affair. Enough TMT writers last year yielded to Zu’s Carboniferous to land it a cool #13 on the EOY list. Not that I want to stamp that contestable RIYL on Untied States , to be clear, but it is similarly knotty to discern what tradition, if any, either band is born of. I’m thinking, Who do I introduce this to? Speed metal junkies, early-90s guitar-rocksters, proto-emoheads, electro-creepers, prog aficionados, tapered noisettes? None of whose tastes are my cup of tea, and it’s only when I snap back into the moment that I realize this album has more to offer than all of those put together. That’s the group’s strength: they’re deceptively shruggable, impossible to discern as a listener’s ‘thing’ or not because of the violence they do to musical identity at large.
Starting with the most obvious gripe — that, structurally, this is basically prog rock — requires a glance at what made ‘prog’ a pejorative in the first place: its ego, its confidence, its high modernism behind the veil of postmodernism. To wit, the album’s craft is incontestable, but Untied States are too nihilistic to be architects. Every change seems aimed to tear down the assumptions of what preceded it. The tension between the alternating woozy and explosive sections of “Bye Bye Bi-Polar” escalates until something snaps, Colin Arnstein spits, “and everything everything everything falls in between”; we’re hit with a mountain of hiss, the drums gallop off alone, and there’s complete indeterminacy. This empty dread when the music has solved nothing and artfully self-immolated seems to be what Untied States are going for: the outro of “Not Fences, Mere Masks” sounds like a fist-pumping transition into the next song, but when they gleefully pull the plug (again, it’s drummer Satchel Mallon who seems to be the dismantler) turns out to be a mockery of our symphonic satisfaction.
The most unsettling elements coursing through the album’s Tilt-a-Whirl melodies are completely divorced of its frenetics, which means that even when Untied States make a racket, they aren’t about the racket. Maybe it’s how Arnstein’s sneer, an Enigk/Keely hybrid, builds intensity by slipping half-steps, reacting to terror more like a snake than a rodent. “I need some substance,” he demands in “Grey Tangerines,” before launching into some eerie “whoa-oh-oh” changelings. “Wrestling With Entropy in the Rehabbed Factory” and especially “Holding Up Walls” contain the kind of disorienting post-melodies that Circulatory System perfected on their last album. These moments, when Arnstein seems to situate his melodies to subvert our worn expectations, are both too proximal and too perplexing to walk away from.
And the intricate sounds that reveal themselves when the proverbial smoke clears hold a similar allure. Maybe it’s how the clean guitar stretches seem to exist in the same harmonic universe that Sonic Youth has been perfecting for 15 years, which creates a gorgeous, hungover foil to the relent. That and, even though they present themselves as a good old guitar-rock group, I’m totally in love with the textured thicket of machines that make up the album’s underbelly. It makes “Delusions Are Grander,” whose length is marked out in ticker tape, a clear centerpiece by situating the group against forces that seem beyond their control. Again, you’re living nihilism when you listen to the album, and no one can say what form the enemy will take except that it will reek of regularity and certainty. Of course Instant Everything, Constant Nothing will sound too cynical, bleak, or densely packed for entry at first, but anything (or anyone) so at war with itself will. Recommended just as highly to those that believe in anything as to those that believe in nothing — they’ll have the most to gain.
More about: Untied States
