At first blush, United Nations is a thrilling, adrenalized Punk band with the sonic markers that define the genre — political lyrics that range from personal to global; double-clutched drumming; riffs that careen wildly from oddly melodic to lethally brutal; vocals that run the gamut from singing in a normal register to shrieking like a panther caught in a leg trap to the guttural growl of a Babylonian misery demon.
United Nations is hair-raising Hardcore at its most visceral and confrontational.
Confrontational may be the watchword with United Nations, as you’ve likely gleaned from the band name. The group would have had less trouble if they’d christened themselves Bill Gates’ Ballsack. Well, a little less.
Nine years ago, Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly and Glassjaw vocalist Daryl Palumbo took a busman’s holiday from their main gigs and formed United Nations with the intent of creating a super Hardcore Screamo project.
For contractual reasons, only Rickly’s name could appear in press materials and their early publicity photo featured four guys in Ronald Reagan masks.
United Nations’ eponymous debut dropped in 2008 and was immediately controversial; the cover art was The Beatles’ Abbey Road sleeve photo, with the band walking in the opposite direction and engulfed in flames. The notoriously litigious Beatles camp lodged no complaint, but some stores refused to stock the album; one outlet even burned the albums it had purchased to sell, per their policy on “copyright infringing material.”
But it was the band’s name that drew considerably more heat than immolating The Fab Four.
After the album release, the governmental UN shut down the Facebook and MySpace pages of the musical UN, followed by a cease and desist order. Afraid of governmental repercussions, the band’s publicist reportedly quit. The label, Eyeball, had already printed up thousands of copies, so it stopped production and sold existing stock through its website.
From the start, the attempt at anonymity of United Nations has protected them from prosecution, as none of the band’s material has been copyrighted to anyone specifically.
So the group has, in very Punk-like fashion, persevered. The Next Four Years was released last month through Temporary Residence LTD with cover art featuring a collage of the cease and desist letters sent to the band by the actual UN.
UNITED NATIONS plays Newport’s Southgate House Revival on Tuesday, Aug. 12 with Frameworks. Tickets/more info
here .
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2014.