My three favourite tracks taken from a repeat of a session recorded by Unsane on 26 November, 1992 and first broadcast by Peel on 15 January 1993. It was their second Peel Session and owes its place here in large part to residual goodwill towards the slew of Unsane tracks that Peel included in his shows throughout December 1991. Indeed, it was only its unavailability on YouTube back in June 2015, that meant I couldn’t include the studio version of HLL when Peel included it as part of a quartet of tracks from their debut album which he played as a suite on 14 December, 1991.
HLL was the nostalgia cut in the session; Broke, Black Book (Vol II) and Body Bomb previewed material that the group would record for their 1994 album, Total Destruction. While HLL was a shot of distilled nihilism, Broke, with its I feel good refrain sounds curiously optimistic, though being Unsane, it’s unclear whether that good feeling is due to falling in love or embracing death. Certainly the shout of Now piss off! that follows the I feel good lines suggests that they don’t trust the world not to mess up their good feeling.
Black Book (Vol II) and Body Bomb, which I didn’t like enough to include, appear to be companion pieces. The eponymous black book found by Chris Spencer contains details on how to make an explosive device, and Body Bomb, which you can hear on the full session dramatises its use. Leaving aside the tastelessness of it, I left Body Bomb off mainly because it lacked the spark and energy of the other three tracks, it was a bit lumbering in comparison.
As ever, history ended up making some parts of a band’s discography seem grimly prophetic. Unsane recorded these tracks for Peel a few months before the World Trade Centre bombing of February 1993, while Black Book (Vol II) served as a reminder that America had plenty of angry and deranged individuals who saw their calling as being bringers of death via ammonium nitrate and fertiliser. This 23/4/93 Peel show went out four days after the fiery end of the Waco siege, an act which later motivated Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to perpetrate the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history.
Video courtesy of VibraCobra23.
No comments:
Post a Comment