Dead Unicorn: Horny Devils
by Peter Aaron
Hold your ears, it’s the end of the world. Or at least what it might well sound like: a rehearsal by apocalyptic power-punk/noise duo Dead Unicorn at the band’s home base, midtown Kingston club The Basement. And it’s a well-suited roar indeed, given the obsessions explored via the band’s recently reissued 2007 debut, Yellowstone Supervolcano (on the appropriately named Music for End Times label), not to mention the convincingly official-looking propaganda brochures it distributes at gigs.
“Everyone I know is obsessed with the end times these days,” says drummer and vocalist Zac Shaw, 27. “We’re all from the Cold War generation. I watch a lot of [programs on] the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel—all of that stuff about Nostradamus and the Apocalypse. It’s just the zeitgeist right now.”
But the cheery theme of world destruction is more than the timely topic that informs Dead Unicorn’s album; it’s also the central concept behind the band itself. “The idea first hit Zac and me when we met this local character called Old Man Willie, who told us about the massive volcano under Yellowstone Park that’s due to erupt at any time,” says bassist and vocalist Paul Heath, 31. “When it blows, it’s supposed to destroy a huge part of North America. That got us thinking about the end-times scenario, and we came up with role-playing games based on how people would react if they heard the world was going to end.”
“We’re both pretty sarcastic and darkly humorous, so we came up with the idea of a band that only writes music about the end times,” explains Shaw. “The idea is to devote each album we do to a particular color-coded scenario. The first one, which is Code Red, is all about the Yellowstone volcano; the next one, Code Orange, is about nuclear war. Then there [will be] albums about tsunamis, asteroid collisions, epidemic diseases, even extraterrestrial invasion and the Rapture.”
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