Genre: Scream-o / Metal

Track Listing:

01 The Spinning Heart of the Yo-Yo Lobby
02 Resolution #9
03 No Sympathy For a Sinking Ship
04 The Shape of Punk That Never Came
05 My Cold War
06 Model
07 Un-filmed in Front of a Live Studio Audience
08 Revolutions in Graphic Design
09 I Keep Living the Same Day
10 Subliminal Testing
11 Say Goodbye to General Figment of the USS Imagination

There is something strange afoot: when going to MySpace to learn more about this new scream-o metal band who call themselves United Nations, to find out what I could about their new release - an eponymous DIY effort, I was frustrated at my attempt to check out their page - When I got to what used to be their page it had obviously been disabled. This was confirmed when I read on another website that had information on the musical UN - it turns out that both MySpace and Facebook have both taken down the pages that were set up by UN frontman Geoff Rickly, whose day job is as singer for Thursday. United Nations is a super-group of sorts; super in the metal area, at least and, except for Rickly, the rest are under contracts elsewhere, so let’s just say that the rest of the group includes, for instance, a guy who sounds a lot like Daryl Polumbo, vocalist for Glassjaw and for Head Automatica; then, listening to his beats, you can’t help but think that it’s Converge drummer, Ben Koller, but it couldn‘t be these guys, right? That would get them in trouble. Since Rickly is the only one who is not bound by any other contracts, the band, in photos and on stage, wear Ronald Reagan masks like the one worn by Patrick Swayze in Point Break.

The basic thing about Rickly and his friends, also known as United Nations is that there is a grass-roots, web-based effort to get people to put (the band’s) UN Logo on MySpace and/or Facebook as their “default photo” - the picture that pops up when you sign in or when you send a comment to another member. To download the band’s logo (which is also the real UN’s logo) and make it your default picture on your front page of both of those sites as a protest for their censorship due to heavy-handed tactics by Ban-Ki Moon & Co. in NYC, go to Eyeball Records or else do a “Google“ search of “United Nations-rock band” (to narrow it down a little).

They’re almost as hard-core in defending their trademarks as the Disney Co. is. Maybe if the real United Nations got down to the business of what their missions are supposed to be instead of harassing unthreatening young musicians the world would be a little better.

The music on this self-titled album (the cover of which was originally a picture that re-tooled the original Abbey Road cover art, except that on the new, re-done picture, the four Beatles were on fire and the photo had been inverted so that it appeared they were walking the other way across the street. Whoops - they got in trouble for that stunt too and ended up only printing a limited run of 1000 copies of that banned cover which has since been re-done and re-packaged as a dark black cover with their name and logo in a darker black emblazoned on the front sleeve) is your basic “scream-O” metal chutney. With a bad attitude, minds that have a pranksters gift and a bunch of fast, raw and nervous sp-sp-sp-speed metal.

Of the 11 tracks on this eponymous CD, some of the best ones, worth mentioning, include “Resolution #9” (part of their having fun with the Beatles), “My Cold War”, “Model” and the last cut, “Say Goodbye to General Figment of the USS Imagination”. Just coming up with that last title takes a creative mind. In the end, though, the tunes behind the names are really what need to be judged here, while the titles are nice, what matters most is the quality of the songwriting, the talent of the musicians and their originality.

Now, UN aren’t the most novel band around, they haven’t re-invented rock ‘n’ roll or started a religion or anything, they just want to make a whole lot of noise. They didn‘t (I don‘t think they did) set out to get into any legal wrangling over their use of the “oh-so-useful-and-corrupt to a tee“ ‘real‘ United Nations. Originally, I believe, their intent was more along the lines of using the UN name & logo to make a statement, nothing heavy, no names were mentioned… But, in the end, the heavy-hitters in NYC decided that their big, fat salaries demanded that they do something, or at least make it look like they were trying to come down hard on people who would “misuse” the “holy” UN logo.