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June 03, 2005
now available in Portugal
the Unicorns - Abominable Snowman
This is an unreleased Unicorns track, which I found on the invaluable Secret Unicorns Forum (by clicking on Nicholas, the one in the middle. The people there have put together a very nice collection of stuff, from the Unicorns, Th' Corn Gangg, and Alden Ginger/Penner). The truth is: this song belonged on "Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone". The real truth is: the Unicorns performed this for Xfm Radio's One Night Stand sessions (the Xfm site is not forthcoming about when this took place though). But 'Abominable Snowman' measures up to all the material from "WWCOHWWG" and indeed is a sweet angry lullaby.
'Abominable Snowman' features some classic Unicorns lyrics, here is a taste: "Rack of lamb of God/we serve you instead/on a bed"..."Track sasquatches/through the snowy climes of Canada/are you an upright bear?/are you even there?/do you exist?". Sort of a nice cross-bred fable of Lewis & Clark, the Yeti from Rankin and Bass' "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", and Futurama (they speak of frozen heads). However, there is nothing quite as heartbreaking as this (somehow romantic references to biomes really get to me): "my how the tundra has grown/since you've been gone/everyone's gone". Despite the fact that most of their lyrics fall well within the Venn of 'macabre', their music has always struck me as calming- not because it's laidback, because it's definitely not- but comforting more in the way that a sweet song sung (or hummed) in a dark, scary place would be soothing. Plus, of course, they cram about 7,000 individual hooks into any given track. Much has been made of the song structure the band used- their non-reliance on repetition- and it always seemed like their songs were almost connected synaptically, where one melodic section would be associated, loosely, with another.
It's a shame that they broke up, but 'Abominable Snowman' is as good a goodbye as any (they say it at least 60x in the song).
Posted by Kevin at June 3, 2005 08:45 AM
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