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Vulgar Unicorn - Sleep With The Fishes

Artist:	Vulgar Unicorn
Title:	Sleep With The Fishes
Label:	Cyclops CYCL040
Length(s):	72 minutes
Year(s) of release:	1996
Month of review:	11/1996

Line up

Neil Randall - everything
Bruce Soord - also everything
Lyrics by Randall, music by both.

Tracks

1)	Food For Thought	18.17
2)	Sieving The Day's Events	17.25
3)	The Stitch	15.56
4)	Unnatural Animation	20.45

Fortunately the album consists of sixteen parts, instead of four songs.

Summary

As they are not in a position to write songs under 15 minutes and at least one over 20 it's obvious this CD could only contain four tracks. Fortunately when inserted into the drive we find it contains 16 tracks.

The music

Not much has changed with this band. The two people that make up Vulgar Unicorn (Hutchfield is not part of the band anymore) still brew a mostly instrumental brand of progressive rock with a few track with lyrics, sung by themselves or maybe Tony Busby, and some mood evoking samples thrown in. This brand of progressive rock is not often found and the band is thus hard to categorize. In a way they can be likened to indie bands, but that's of course not all. The instrumentation on the album is very diverse with clarinet, sax, oboe, flute and then some. Going over all four tracks one by one I found that there's little relation between one part of a track and another and the collection seems rather arbitrary. Food for Thought is about eating far too much then is necessary. The first part is an intro with gurgling sounds and more of that. The next part is rather psychedelic while the drums are a bit monotonous and sound dry. The singing is like on the rest of this album very relaxed. The third part is rather indielike, while the closing part is quite heavy with a good riff.

Sieving the Day's Events is more a reflection on how the mind works. It starts with distorted guitar, quick drumming and keyboards. Then the song becomes more melodic with the guitar on the fore. The next one is the synthy side of the band and reminds me of the inside of a cave, a bit mysterious. The third part is a bit dreamy and has a drumcomputer (too audible as well), while the last part is jazzy.

The rest of the album continues more or less in this way, meaning that we have some jazzy excursions, good stuff on acoustic guitar and some more or less unstructured parts featuring a lot of sound, but little melody.

Conclusion

A hard one to review this. I think the album is challenging in its own right and it might be good to keep an eye out for them, but on the whole its not something I'd play often: there is little melody and little structure. If there was a message, it did not get across.