From the dissonance of the preliminary drones and ensuing dual-guitar aggregation on “Gorilla the Bull”, you might suspect you’re cashing in on a hefty slice of serrated experimental rock. You are, and it might be about time. Untied States, a blusterous four-piece from Atlanta, Georgia, has been banging away at their instruments for over seven years. Possibly breaking too many mirrors recording two full-length releases and still flying under the radar, their third record would be the one to finally end the curse.
With any expectations knocked into a cocked hat on their 2010 Distile release Instant Everything, Constant Nothing, Untied States alchemize visceral post-punk riffs and spurning No Wave irreverence into three-quarters of an hour of amnesic math-rock esprit.
Finding it absolutely necessary to hear for myself how these fractured tracks coalesce in a live set, I made my way out to Garfield Artworks in Pittsburgh to see how the proverbial land lies. The Untied States were third on the bill and that gave me the opportunity to chat with the band about the new record, their hometown in the South, playing shows together, and their recording processes past and present.
The Untied States are Colin Arnstein (vocals and guitar), Skip Engelbrecht (guitar, bass, and effects), Darren Tablan (synthesizers and bass), and Satchel Mallon (drums).
Is this your first time in Pittsburgh?
Colin: Yeah, it's our first time.
You guys are gonna spend some time in the city, maybe, and check out some things?
Colin: Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna check it out tomorrow 'cause we have, uh, I think we have a good break. We're only goin' to Columbus, so...
Skip: How far is Columbus? Do you know? Three hours?
Four hours maybe? Something like that. Definitely not as bad as what you guys had already pulled last night. You guys came in from
Colin: After what we pulled, exactly. Right.
How was the show in
Colin: It was, uh, interesting. It was at a really cool place.
Skip: We played RISD, the school of design.
Colin: It's called the Tap Room.
Skip: It was, like, the Talking Heads had played there before or something. That's what they said.
Tap Room? Do they have a good beer selection there or something?
Colin: Uh, no. It was a university deal. They had money so they paid us well.
Skip: We had to sign that W-9 or something to get the money, really…
Colin: Very professional.
Skip: But it was in their Memorial Hall and it was, like, pretty swank. You know, but it was kids—Monday night and it's finals week and supposedly that school has, like, the heaviest load in the country.
Now, the band hails from
Colin: That's interesting. There's a lot going on there. There are pretty much kind of two big groups out of there.
Skip: Deerhunter and Black Lips.
Colin: And Mastodon.
Skip: We know all these people, pretty well.
Colin: I think we fit in a different category between them. You've got, you know, Black Lips—really garage-y primal rock. Then, Deerhunter's ethereal. And then, obviously, we're nothing like Mastodon. We fit somewhere in between.
(motorcycle flies by)
Colin: That's our amp starting up! (laughing)
You guys are playing
Colin: Yeah, because i think people are more enthusiastic. We played a couple shows. We just played in East Hampton, which is in
Skip: It's always less pretentious. and people feel free to be loose. And, they consider themselves artists too.
Colin: Yeah, there's more like a communal back-and-forth kinda thing… and, the kids are going nuts as well.
I actually took that from an Ian MacKaye interview, and he also said the same things. You know, because he's also trying to get out of the 'black boxes'…
Colin: Exactly, because clubs are just… it's a weird thing. You walk in the door, you pay money…
Skip: They're not friendly for people to go into.
Satchel: Well, i think they're kinda used to a bunch of assholes all the time, drinking…
Colin: They stink, cigarettes…
Satchel: Beer, and they're all fucking black. They’re depressing.
Let’s talk about the record. Untied States' material capsulizes a sense of alienation and paranoia.
Skip: (laughing)
Colin: Interesting.
Satchel: Great.
I was thinking kind of a jaggedy retelling of OK Computer. Now, I understand that you guys construct each of the tracks in such a way to get certain emotional responses out of the listeners. What “strings” do you like to tug at?
Colin: I think the best analysis of what we do is that we are kind of answering to a world that wants this instantaneous gratification; this “I gotta have everything.” We're kind of answering that tempo that is set.
Aptly titled on the album.
Colin: Yeah, right, exactly, it's like the promise of everything; the emptiness.
Skip: The alienation thing is something that we definitely don't want, though…
Colin: We're just products from our environment.
Does that spawn from the scene in
Colin: No, we're really personable guys.
The band is embraced very well there.
Colin: Yeah, yeah… it’s just different. We don’t try to do anything on purpose. We just say what we feel, you know. While we made that record, it was pretty crazy.
With all of the off-metered time signatures that you feature in your music, it's almost expedient to assume that everyone in the band enjoys listening to their share of progressive music and art-rock. Who do you guys like to study?
Colin: Well, the thing that we kind of get weird with is we don't like the word 'progressive'.
They kind of did away with that word.
Colin: Yeah, it just implies… we’re not musical nerds. I mean, Darren and I have a little bit of classical background. But, we all take from big ideas, you know, we like big things. And, I like a lot of older music just because the arrangements were wilder. We're not trying to do anything that's complicated. We just want to make a good song.
Skip: As far as groups, I mean it's endless. When you listen to some of our songs, you can pull a melody from an old Beatles song, you know, and then weird stuff from other others. We like all kinds of stuff. We like all music, so...
I was hearing a lot of different influences on the album.
Colin: I guess anytime you do anything as an artist that's obviously too “something”, you wanna go and not make it so...
Fuck it up a little bit or something.
Colin: Exactly.
Because of those winding progressions and the tempo shifts, do you guys ever have trouble playing older material because you forget all the parts?
Satchel: You have to relearn...
Colin: When we make our record, there're a couple of tracks that we made, you know, we kind of built them up from all these places. We had a sample from one night drunk at the house, and then a sample of where it stops. Sometimes, we have to learn it from the recording.
Skip: The prior record, if you asked me to play one of those songs, i'd be like 'fuck you'. (laughing)
Colin: We want to get to the point where we're doing the oldies, but we've always been doing fresh music. We're doing three new songs tonight that aren't on the record.
Yeah, I had heard something about an EP?
Colin: We're working on it. We just laid some basic stuff. When we get back, we're gonna finish it off.
That's great. You have that excitement—you put something down and you just want to release it.
Colin: Absolutely.
Do you guys have any idea how difficult it is to search the words “Untied States” on Google?
Colin: Yeah… (laughing)
Skip: You gotta hyphenate it, or something. You gotta put it in quotes in Google. (laughing)
Colin: It's weird, I don't know what it says about our group. We made that name thinking “okay, let's just take something and tweak it a little bit.” And, it's come back to mean a lot of different things. And, you can't search us. It says "Did you mean... ?"
There you go. You’d have to contact 'big brother' on that one. Going back to the album, a lot of the songs on Instant Everything, Constant Nothing are so thickly-textured and frenetic, yet all of the band members seem to contribute to the material and complement each other so well. Did any of these songs come together out of a jam or just letting the tape roll, that kind of thing?
Colin: Yeah
Skip: No, you tell me which one.
Colin: “Wrestling with Entropy…” is a total mash of five different worlds. We grabbed the samples...
Skip: Yeah, but it didn't come off from a jam.
Darren: Well, it kind of did. We took a lot of stuff from jams, recorded it, and then used the samples for that. So in a way...
Skip: I guess you're right.
Colin: Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that, and it's not so much as the previous record. This was a little more cohesive. Let's go in, do more cohesive pop songs. Our last record was “off the wall”. While we didn't think so, but then when we played it for other people and they looked at us upside-down. Then we knew.
Satchel: The songs changed as well. When I entered the band, it was like “here's this other material, some of its done, some of its not”. So there's room to...
Colin: It's a very crazy thing. The thing that's interesting is that Darren was working at this high-end studio and we kind of came in with parts of this dirty world that we recorded and then we brought it into this kind of high felluten thing. So, there's this mash of really lo-fi and really hi-fi.
How long did it take to put each track together?
Skip: It's wild because we had this house where we started the recording in and we built it out to have studios and different booths and stuff and it was like real swank and we were really fortunate to be there, but then the shit hit the fan there and we had to leave in one day.
That wasn’t the empty warehouse?
Colin: No, that's where we've been recording recently.
Skip: And, then we met up with Darren and it was sort of like 'hey, bring those tracks here'. But, then the problem with going there was that we were recording for free after hours and we would, like, get kicked out of the studio for Bruce Springsteen to come in and record.
Where was this at?
Skip: Southern Tracks.
Colin: So, it added a little bit to the mystique.
Skip: So, it took a long fucking time.
Satchel: …looking at all the gold records on the wall, and (Bruce) is, like, hanging out.
Colin: But, it was fun because we were literally sneaking in between Bruce Springsteen and… uh... Sugarland? Is that a band that people know? (laughing)
I think so. I have you on tape saying 'Sugarland', by the way. (laughing)
Darren: That's off record (laughing)
I'll cut that one out. Alright, just to end things up here, what are you guys doing on April 3rd of next year? Do you guys know about this?
Satchel: No…
Colin: Oh God…
WrestleMania XXVII in
Satchel: Oh my God.
Colin: Well, I guess you just told us.
Yeah, there you go. Consider yourselves informed. One of the fastest-growing cities, you’re hosting WrestleMania now.
Colin: Absolutely. (laughing) Skip did the monster truck rally.
Skip: I did the monster truck rally, like, three months ago and it was wild. I would definitely go again.
Colin: Maybe we can play it? (laughing)
See if you can get that gig. That'd be a really sweet gig!
Satchel: They would love us wouldn't they? (laughing)
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Check out Untied States on MySpace
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That was great! You need to do more interviews, you have a way with words and an excellent knowledge base. And there's the charm. It seems easy for you to talk to people you just met and ask them about their work. You know where you could do many interviews at venues with artists?... ;)
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