Debut album by Atlanta five-piece Untied States that is a tricky feast to digest it has to be said, but take the time to absorb it and a feast it surely is. Musically, the whole outing is a journey of compelling discordance. It teases you with familiar sounds before tugging them from your grasp and shoving them through the mangle, before slowly re-emerging from the other side with a complacent nonchalance. Try to imagine making choice extracts from ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’, ‘Amnesiac’ and ‘See This Through And Leave’ then welding them all together to make a souped-up evoluted wagon of their own. For there are clear influences of Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Cooper Temple Cause throughout, often meeting head-on but rarely harmonising as a team. Yet it is those transitional step changes that make for this being something of real worth.

Single, ‘Bye Bye Bi-Polar’ is perhaps the best example of the Pink Floyd influence, where awkward rhythms punctuate a rich musical soundscape, also ‘Kowtow Great Equilizer’ where there’s complete musical disorder, yet the finished product remains strangely listenable and convincing.

There are quieter moments though and this is where the Radiohead analogy comes through. On tracks like ‘Great Tangerines’ and moreso ‘These Dead Birds’, where there is a schizophrenic unease that gets blown away by a blistering blast of aggression. It’s when this aggression is channelled that the band sound at their best, on ‘Delusions Are Grander’ (do you see what they did there?!) there’s a hard driving rhythm and a relentless breathlessness that reminds one of Panzer Attack.

I recommend you listen then persevere with this one, because it holds a lot of clever twists and turns, and that compelling discordance gets stronger on each listen. It’s complicated, it’s progressive and it’s experimental but there’s also enough of a commercial edge to their sound to suggest they have the potential to produce more astounding material. It’s probably also fair to assume that the stage show must be really something, should we be privileged enough to receive a visit on these shores. Investigate now!!

4/5

www.myspace.com/untiedstates

TC