Thursday, May 08, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Blood work

Unsane brings guts and gore back to hardcore

By Newt Briggs

If anyone thought that New York City noise-rock trio Unsane would sell out with its major-label debut Total Destruction in 1993, his fears should have been immediately allayed by the album's cover art--a picture of a wrecked Monte Carlo dripping blood and gore from its smashed bumper and radiator grille. In fact, there was something unusually sinister about the photo, something hauntingly familiar about the black-red ooze seeping from the twisted wreckage. The reason, as Unsane singer/guitarist Chris Spencer explains, was simple: The blood was real.

"There's a place called The Lamb House on 14th Street in New York that sells cow's blood by the gallon," says Spencer, who had previously done prosthetic effects for Richard Kern's infamous underground shock films Submit to Me and Submit to Me Now. "Real blood gives a scene a feel that you just can't get from the fake stuff."

Just another in a long line of carnage-laden album covers (a series that includes an unpublished newspaper photograph of a body decapitated by a train wheel and a snapshot from a Mexican crime scene where a young girl had euthanized her ailing mother with a ballpeen hammer), the Total Destruction cover was also a fitting tribute to Unsane's ferocious sound--something that frequently approached the velocity and violence of a 90 mph car crash. Born out of the NYC hardcore underground that produced Helmet, Surgery and Boss Hog, Unsane brought an unknown menace to the genre, blending howling riffs, fuzzy vocals and throbbing rhythms into an unprecedented orgy of sonic aggression.

Of course, Unsane's take-no-prisoners assault on the eardrums also spilled over into its live performances--shows renowned for their unmitigated wail and wallop. Looking back on more than a decade of touring, Spencer recalls a surfeit of concert carnage--none, he says, more brutal than the time he saw a fan swan dive off an elevated speaker stack onto a cement floor. "After we finished playing, I went outside, and the kid was sitting on the sidewalk bleeding out of his ears. I mean, blood was actually running out of his ears and down his face, so I was like, `Hey, man, you're not looking so good.' The dude was pretty fucked up and incoherent, but eventually we convinced him he had to go to the hospital and get some medical attention."

Unfortunately, it's not only Unsane fans who seem prone to injury. Doing promotional work in Vienna in 1998, Spencer was attacked and beaten by a gang of anti-American hoodlums--an attack that left him unconscious and nearly dead in the middle of the street.

"All I remember is being kicked in the head and body for an extended period of time," Spencer says. "My small intestine was lacerated, but the doctors couldn't find the source of the bleeding. They had to cut me open and go through all my organs to see where it was coming from. They cut open my kidneys, my liver, my spleen and both of my intestines. They ended up cutting off a little piece of my small intestine. Afterwards, the doctors told me that my heart stopped like six times while I was in the ICU."

The Austrian police never caught the thugs who stomped Spencer, but the attack didn't deter him from returning to Vienna. Nor did his experience on the emergency room slab spoil his passion for guts and gore. Anticipating the release of an Unsane anthology on Relapse Records this fall, he's already completed the cover art--a work he calls "the goriest, most sickening cover we've ever done."

"We used five and a half gallons of cow's blood inside this fucked up, deserted religious school in Brooklyn. Inside, it's got all this freaky old architecture and graffiti and trash, and people have been shooting up in there and stuff. So we just went in there and hosed the whole thing down with blood until it was like pouring down the stairs. It was really cool."