3 out of 5

Label: Southern Lord

Produced by: Unsane

Surprise – I’m… getting old? My ears can’t handle that rock and roll music? I worry about this sometimes, when I’m not down with something loud and heavy that otherwise gets a good reception: wondering if I’m only ever going to be down with nostalgia hardcore jamz like Botch or whatever, and anything “new” I’ll shake my fist at, but then I review my actual listening habits, and recall that I geek out over Nails‘ newest, or a band with a name like Cuntroaches, so maybe I can still hang out with the young metal kids after all, even if it’s as that dopey, wrinkled bald guy in the background, quietly saying he’s down with the sickness or somesuch. 

And in that review of my listening habits, I do note some preferences that have kept pretty consistent in my tastes: preferences for a bit of range in presentation, for example, even when we’re dealing with three chord punksters, or shouty rockers, or their cross-section, a la Unsane. 

Unsane’s Sterilize is surely a solid disc, and had me paying attention and bobbing my head from the get-go, but a couple tracks in, I noted that that get-go style and sound seemed to hang over the majority of the album. The group’s got riffs; Chris Spencer’s got admirable vitriol in his delivery; but the cadence and tone and structure of these tracks is very similar throughout, which renders that vitriol less impactful as things go on. The production, handled by the band, doesn’t help: though allowing for a warm, immediate sound that had me thinking this was an Andrew Schneider job, there’s not much range to it. It hits, but doesn’t reverberate; things fall slightly flat. This certainly isn’t immediately noticeable (at least to my layperson ears), but it’s part of the pileup of the repetition of the sound. 

For comparison, I went back and listened to some older Unsane, which I recalled enjoying, and found it to be much more powerful and punishing, even if the group has stuck to the same vein and distorted shout-speak singing the whole while, there’s just a bit more looseness and danger to the older approach, with Sterilize (ironically…?) being comparatively polished. 

Where this ends up working really well is when the group leverages that polish for some more expansive compositions. It’s not that they get all mathy, but towards the disc’s end – the last third or so – we get some more experimentation to the tone and pace (melody enters the picture…) that helps to counterpose the heft, making those hard moments actually hit harder. 

Nothing about Sterilize is bad, per se, and repeated spins allowed me to hear a bit more distinction in its opening rush of tracks. But I had to dig for that. Otherwise, beyond its initial aggression, the sound can actually fall unto the background, until later tracks open things up more interestingly.