The Unicorns

Much con­tin­ued Uni­corns hys­te­ria. After crash­ing the con­cert they tried to keep hid­den from me last night, I’ve dis­cov­ered today that I am at least eight songs shy of truly know­ing every­thing about the band. First I dis­cover two unre­leased songs (Do the Knife Fight and Ebb Tide, Azure Sky) that are streamed (in very poor qual­ity) from The Uni­corns’ aban­doned web­site. After down­load­ing and crack­ing Lia­tro SWF Decoder to extract what I hope to be higher-fidelity sources behind the Flash facade, I dis­cover that the sources are, in fact, 24kbps mp3s. Still, I am some­what com­forted to have first-hand sources rather than Messer–recorded copies.

I head to SoulSeek to see if I can find bet­ter ver­sions (SoulSeek being the place I ini­tially dis­cov­ered their pre-album demos), and I imme­di­ately turn up (in addi­tion to a 128kbps Do the Knife Fight) two songs I’d never heard of (Big Kind Death and Let Me Sleep). Clearly the work of The Uni­corns, I ask the owner of the files to expand on his acqui­si­tion of them. He tells me he’s from a town neigh­bor­ing the home of The Uni­corns, and that the two mys­tery songs were either the work of Zzzz, a side-project of The Uni­corns respon­si­ble for There Are No Answers and an early ver­sion of Sea Ghost, which I had already encountered…or of All Makes Parts & Col­li­sion, a side-project of Alden’s (exclu­sively, I believe; as vis­i­tors to a very old Uni­corns guest­book note, “Nick is sloppy”). Not only that, but Alden also works on a solo side-project that’s pretty good. Find­ing this shit is hard enough on its own, let alone rec­on­cil­ing incon­sis­tent bands, titles, and record­ing dates. How can I be obsessed with some­thing that’s such a pain in the ass?