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Dead Unicorn - Yellowstone Supervolcano

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By: Alibastard | in: Music |

Dead Unicorn

Uniquely playful, genuinely disquieting and strangely catchy-as-hell, Dead Unicorn’s 1st of 7 planned End of Times concept albums blazes in a limited release super-volcano all its own. Somehow achieving operatic theatricality while still being fist-flailingly punk rock, Yellowstone Supervolcano is at moments grindcore tomfoolery, at moments deeply morbid artpunk.

Kingston (New York) artists Paul Heath and Zac Shaw strip the instrumental aesthetic to only drum and bass – that is, a double-peddled, fuzz-jittered, but still oddly melodic collaboration, livened by narrative soundscapes, found-footage-esque public announcement samples, and unquestionably epic vocal harmonies, not too precious to be devastating in their prophecy.

Although you’d think the duo’d be limited by their apocalyptic preoccupation (in this case, with Earth’s certain annihilation by the “inactive” Yellowstone volcano), all angles of the situation are mischievously probed with tongue-in-cheek solemnity. At times this unfurls in conceptually minimal, faux-metal humor (“What the fuck will you do/When all you know is gone/Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”) – what you’d imagine Kool Keith or Peaches would resign themselves to were they trapped in an underground cave with only recording equipment, a drum kit, a bass guitar and a lot of sudden hardcore influence.

Dead Unicorn

But moving quickly on from the one-trick pony of minimalist comedy, Heath and Shaw jump more seriously into endlessly inventive territory – the last words of a Yellowstone park ranger sung against driving harmonic pops, the strangely uplifting (um, sort of) anthem We All Burn Together (And we scream and we moan/ As old Yellowstone/ Rains a storm of fiery weather!/……./As the earth starts to crack/ And the sky’s turning black/ And we all burn together!), and ending the whole event with Halflife, one part do-wop melancholy, two parts prog-metal devastation – a brief account of what happens if you were to actually survive the blast of Yellowstone’s destruction. Yikes.

Overall the album achieves a detached kind of haunting narrative. A deceptively background “beginning, middle and end” structure encases 12 songs that each invoke a sense of actual terror balanced keenly with a blanketing sense of the absurd. Comparable to a Lightening Bolt with more instrumental range, Dead Unicorn is a scrapbook of a possible apocalypse, of which Heath and Shaw predict 6 more variations to unfold.
The band reprints 300 more albums this month, and plays a limited run of shows, so be quick to ensnare whatever you can of them…before something like this actually happens.

Dead Unicorn - We All Burn Together

Dead Unicorn on MySpace


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Posted on September 25, 2007

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