Pitchfork

It's rocking, it's funky, it's angry... It's another guitar band from Britain. This one's called Unisex and they're the remnants of the occasionally interesting British band from the early 1990s, the Telescopes. The Telescopes were mainly a singles and EP band on the British label Creation. They churned out shoegazer pop songs for about five years and released a couple of uneventful LPs before disbanding. Never heard of them, y'say? That's 'cause they were essentially a poor man's Jesus and Mary Chain.

After the demise of the Telescopes, vocalist Stephen Lowrie and guitarist Joanna Doran decided to dish the old shoegazer sound and update to a more guitar-driven pop, a la what Jesus and Mary Chain did when they revised their sound on Honey's Dead. Unisex's first major release, Deadlock, is hardly the sappy-sweet shoegazer rock of their pasts. The guitars are harder, the melodies are more cohesive, the hooks are more defined. The lyrics are far from pretty and mainly deal with violent daydreams. But Deadlock has one finding redemption with ".45." "TV Cowboy" is exactly what you'd expect it to be: another song about guns and violence. "Smash It In, Kick It On," slows the tempo down, but not the rage. "Airtight" is, interestingly enough, an airtight piece-- slow tempo with a lot of Beatles-esque techniques.

Combine 1960s British pop music sensibilities with the wall of guitars and angry, antisocial songs of the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Pixies, and you have Unisex. It's a combination that's highly effective, and makes for a short but entertaining release. It's unlikely that Unisex will receive any widespread attention here in the states if they fail to put together cohesive LPs (a mistake that Lowrie and Doarn made with the Telescopes), but Deadlock shows enough innovation to make it worth seeking out.