Secret History: Unrest's Perfect Teeth
Our occasional series, "Secret History," features profiles of classic D.C. albums as a way of looking back at the District's contributions to music over time. This installment finds DCist reminiscing over Unrest's final LP, Perfect Teeth (Teenbeat/4AD, 1993).
In a lot of ways, Unrest were the epitome of the best aspects of D.C.'s indie rock culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Smart, excitable kids with good ideas and boundless enthusiasm, ambitious without any concrete reasons to be, these Arlingtonians remained undaunted in their efforts to make music – exciting, interesting, catchy-as-hell music – and give people outside of their immediate social circle a chance to hear it.
Unrest's catalog (several LPs and numerous singles, EPs, and compilation tracks) represents a sprawling stylistic map of beloved inspirations and far-ranging experimentalism, veering from raucous hardcore to homespun acoustic folk to noisy art rock to heavy metal homage to poised, flawlessly crafted pop masterpieces in the UK mold. And by founding Teenbeat Records, Mark Robinson – Wakefield High graduate and Unrest's singer, guitarist, and lead audio architect, as well as the mastermind behind Grenadine, Air Miami, and Flin Flon – ushered in one of American indie rock's most revered labels while simultaneously providing D.C. with an outlet for the more overtly poppy sounds of the local scene.
1993's Perfect Teeth LP, Unrest's last, is perhaps the greatest distillation of the group's vision and abilities. Its 11 tracks find the band, which was Robinson, bassist/vocalist Bridget Cross, and drummer Phil Krauth, operating at the top of its game, perfecting the pristine (but never sterile), endlessly listenable approach introduced on 1992's must-have Imperial f.f.r.r. full-length, and closing out Unrest's impressive decade-plus run in fine style. A mix of indie pop burners and subdued, thoughtful sonic meditations, Perfect Teeth is bulletproof.
"We definitely loved New Order and Joy Division," Robinson said while speaking with DCist recently about Unrest's many influences. "Especially New Order, of course, [who] were very pop. But you can just go back and look at the older Unrest stuff, and while it doesn't seem as poppy as the later stuff, it's just because there were less pop songs, but the pop songs were definitely there. It's just that we were into so many different things that we kind of tried to play all these different styles as well;. I don't think anything was ever conscious about that, we just kind of tried to do the music that we wanted to do, or do the sonic experiments that we wanted to do."
Perfect Teeth definitely falls squarely on the poppier spectrum of Unrest's output. The slower songs, like the shimmering pastoral opener "Angel I Will Walk You Home," with its delicate chords and ethereal vocals courtesy of Cross, and the stately "Soon It Is Going To Rain" (surely one of the loveliest indie pop songs ever laid to tape), rub shoulders comfortably with madly-strummed treble-kickers like the Factory Records scenester / Miaow frontwoman-checking "Cath Carroll" (that's her Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover), the explosive "Make Out Club," and the hip-sprung, fleet-wristed "So Sick." Elsewhere, "West Coast Love Affair"'s breezy, effortlessly catchy melody and nimble rhythms conjure up bossa nova via Columbia Pike, while "Food & Drink Synthesizer" and "Breather X.O.X.O." keep one foot firmly planted in the theoretical.
Throughout the album, chords blur and bend (read the liner notes, "Unrest uses only Sears Silvertone brand guitar amplifiers because they want the best") while the bass pushes the melody through the speakers and the drums aggressively mark time and add momentum. According to the band, no guitar effects or synthesizers were employed during the recording of Perfect Teeth, giving the LP an organic aspect nicely balanced by the precision of the compositions.
Like Imperial f.f.r.r., Perfect Teeth was released in conjunction with legendary UK label 4AD, which throughout the 1980s and early '90s was behind a string of influential albums by the Cocteau Twins, Modern English, Dead Can Dance, Bauhaus, the Pixies, Lush, the Breeders, and others. "What I really liked about them, kind of like Factory, they cared a lot about the packaging and design [of their releases]," Robinson said. "Except 4AD was much more cohesive; they seemed to stick to their house designer more often."
To engineer the record, Robinson chose Brian Paulson, who had recently worked on Slint's epic Spiderland LP and would go on to produce albums for the likes of Superchunk, the Wedding Present, and Wilco. "I definitely loved [Paulson's] recordings," Robinson said. "[His approach] just sounded fresh; it was very natural sounding."
"He wasn't a producer that would make you do take after take," Cross added. "He let us do whatever we wanted. We liked that. I'm not sure how the record company felt about it. For some reason I remember him being like a vampire. Maybe we recorded at night a lot or maybe he was really punk rock, I can't remember."
"We recorded at this place that I think Brian suggested," remembers Robinson. "It’s called Pachyderm, in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota…. And it was a pretty posh studio. You actually stay there, you live in the studio, so we went there for a week…. Just a few weeks earlier, Nirvana had been in there recording In Utero … And then there was an indoor heated swimming pool in the house, which was nice."
The band wasn’t quite used to such luxury. "The first day," says Robinson, "they just could not get the equipment working, and we were used to paying for studio time ourselves, so we were getting really, like…we're like, man, we're wasting all this and the equipment's not even working, and we're not recording. So we actually didn't even record that first day until pretty late at night. That's why I think a lot of the songs — I remember 'Cath Carroll' in particular – I think the reason that it's so crazy fast is that we were just really kind of anxious to record."
Adds Cross, "The whole Perfect Teeth recording experience was very surreal. Pachyderm Studios had all these stories: Kurt Cobain sessions, Jimmy Hendrix's Electric Ladyland sound board in the studio.... Was any of it true? Does it matter? The studio was adjacent to a deluxe Playboy-like mansion with an indoor pool, amazing furniture, and acres of gardens complete with large mushrooms carved from wood.... One afternoon we went for a walk by the river that ran by the property and saw flocks of wild turkeys. We thought all the snow and cold and turkeys were really exotic."
Looking back at Perfect Teeth today, Robinson says the only thing he regrets is that the band members, himself included, were probably involved in the mixing a little too much.
"I think I should have not even been there," he said. "It was mixed in Bethesda, Maryland at Avalon with Brian Paulson. I just remember at some point I was twiddling a lot of knobs. And, like, I know on some of the songs, the vocals are not very loud, which is what we wanted. But I know 4AD paid someone to remix a lot of those songs. Not for the record, but for the radio promos." In fact, Duran Duran's Simon LeBon is given credit for production duties on Perfect Teeth.
"All the Unrest records are so different, at least to me," Robinson continued. "They probably sound exactly the same to everyone else…. [We] would record, like, 20 songs for each record. And I sometimes think, 'Oh, how would the album have been different if we had chosen other songs to be on the album?' But in general, we probably chose the best songs to be on the record."
"Listening to Perfect Teeth today for me," observes Cross, "is like being in a dream and hearing a distant soundtrack with flashes of images and emotions. A very distant dream."