During the critical period i’m exploring in this Lent Series, 1977–81, alongside the assorted group divisions, schisms and reformations i’ve mentioned previously, another recurring problem was artists finding it difficult to get their music heard. San Francisco synthpunk band Units – led by husband and wife Scott Ryser and Rachel Webber, with drummer Brad Saunders – had put out their debut album, Digital Stimulation, in 1980 on local label 415 Records. It’s impressively forthright, adopting a rock-like aesthetic – synths replacing guitars – with raw punk energy channelled into punchy, catchy forms of observational critique. So it’s as baffling as it was no doubt enormously frustrating that their even more powerful follow-up, Animals They Dream About, despite being completed in 1981 was shelved due to “really bad offers” from labels. Unbelievably, it would take another 35 years before the album would finally be released, in 2016, courtesy of Futurismo.
The album has particular connections to two others i’ve explored in this series. Sonically, it has a link to Sound-on-Sound by Bill Nelson’s Red Noise. Nelson actually travelled to San Francisco to work on the album with Webber and Ryser (he’s credited as playing synths, guitar and drums), and perhaps that’s not surprising considering the extent to which Units – arguably even more so on their previous album – embody a similarly bristling, borderline chaotic energy, full of urgency and necessity. The other, much more extensive connection is thematic, forming an interesting counterpart to John Foxx’s Metamatic. Where Foxx’s album inhabits an imaginary, abstracted, seemingly unoccupied noirish cityscape, Animals They Dream About plays out by daylight on real, heavily populated, concrete (in every sense) city streets.
Wanting to improve the group dynamic – “we decided we would approach it more like a jazz quartet”, Ryser’s liner notes explain – Units reformed with drummer Seth Miller (Saunders having left the group) and Jon Parker on synths and percussion. Yet Animals They Dream About draws closer to John Foxx in its palette, projecting a much more consistent electronic sheen than the punk rock-synth fusion heard on Digital Stimulation. However, the essence of their sound here is nonetheless very much a continuation from that debut, articulated with a vibe that’s in the best sense subtly conflicted: musically bright and upbeat, lyrically terse and direct, lending the critical bedrock of the album a nicely paradoxical combination of cool and warmth, weightlessness and heft. What this means in real terms is that while their music has a similarly observational quality to Foxx’s Metamatic, it’s less poetic, more literal. The lyrics are immediate, messages, slogans, almost like diagnostic readouts reporting on conditions, states and behaviours.
The nature of societal function and human interaction were recurring themes on Digital Stimulation and they are here too. Opening track ‘More Alike’ makes a bassline-propelled case for the way people lapse into passive generics, where the desire to belong leads to widescale conformity. “Someone notices my tie / Say yeah this kinda looks like yours / I got it at a Kmart”, sings Webber, also taking a swipe at mass production that, depending on your perspective, is either the active cause or the passive facilitator for this kind of clone-like behaviour. (“Products are like a fate in which we will look alike”, she goes on, perhaps suggesting there’s something unavoidable about it.) The spritely music, crowned by a surging middle 8 – as with Foxx, Units’ synth lines go much further melodically than their voices ever do – echoes something of the unthinking cheerfulness with which this kind of carbon copy daily existence is “lived”.
‘Sidewalk Reel’ analyses this shallowness further, rooted in the way people look at and watch each other. With the gait of what feels like a synth-pop quickstep, the song recounts how we “Fall into step with men / That are silent with ideas”, throwing implied judgement on both the imitator and imitated. Drawing on the energetic swagger of ska, the music is infectious, practically reduced here to pounding militaristic drums and bass. It feels all the more ironic considering, despite all this energy, “Their actions seem so few and similar”. We end up back in cinematic territory – “Join the sidewalk reel” – as a veneer for reality (touched on by John Foxx and Fad Gadget), and the song reinforces this in its emphasis on surface allure: “Shuffle down Broadway / Like moths attracted to the light”.
This focus upon the details of surfaces and external appearances is a major theme in several songs. In ‘Your Face’ it becomes fixated; while the pace is more laidback, the track is static, almost blinkered, in its forward-facing focus. Senses are triggered – “I see your face / I smell your smell / I hear your voice” – yet it’s somewhere between imagination and memory: “But you’re not here”. Units give it a faintly manic quality by doubling the tempo, driving the bassline on (somewhat anticipating OMD’s ‘Locomotion’ by three years) as the vocals endlessly repeat, “Your face your face your face …”.
There are traces here of Foxx’s tangential mode of perception, as there are in ‘Blue or White’, where the focus moves from senses to body parts. They become abstracted into objects and functions: head, hands, feet, sitting; as do their accoutrements: car, hoe, tie, boots. The song undergoes the same push-pull as in ‘Your Face’, holding back through the verses, twice speed at the choruses. It’s all quite low-key, but Units are aiming here at different social classes – blue or white collar – and their respective occupations with their very differing nature and demands. All part of the same system, all narrated with an almost icy neutrality, though culminating in an equally cold account of how opportunity and justice are unequal: “One man goes to jail / One man goes to the bank / One man plays by the rules / That the other makes”. The musical aesthetic, here emphasising metric simplicity, fits perfectly the notion of systems and rules (perhaps with a hint of fatalism), as does the air of cool detachment.
Those same body parts become grotesque in ‘Bones’, personalities reduced to bodies, bodies reduced to skeletons and internal mechanics, provided with spiky, relentless energetic pop for them to gyrate to. “Move those bones / Shake those bones / Sway on those bones / Give way to those bones” – it would be funny if it wasn’t so mercilessly insistent. It has an almost Devo-like daftness, clothed in a modern, silky synth sheen, yet in this context one can’t shake the feeling that there’s something macabre and sinister implied beneath it all. More directly Devo-adjacent is the blatantly absurd ‘Get That Funky Thing Off My Shoe’, a short number recounting the tribulations of having stepped in something nasty. The proximity of “funky” to “fucking” gives it a nice frisson of vulgarity, and the way Units take something ridiculously prosaic and turn it into a strutting upbeat anthem is gleefully mischievous. Yet, let’s not forget, it’s also recounting another undesirable aspect of daily life. Apropos: ‘Interstate 5’, the album’s one instrumental (Digital Stimulation had three) reminds us that all of this is envisaged in a tangible urban context. Though gentle – in some respects an interlude – it’s a sophisticated piece that points ahead to forms of electronica that would come a decade or so later.
Animals They Dream About is at its best when pushing hardest into critique. The title track returns to a fixation on surfaces but complicates it: “Tribes of people / Without walls / Without words, windows, clothes / They aren’t naked, they aren’t silent / They don’t see in what they can’t see out”. Perception is compromised, isolation is ostensibly inverted – everyone exposed – yet at the same time compartmentalised, hidden, perhaps trapped: “A million little rooms / With curtains tightly drawn”. As elsewhere, Units structure this as a sequence of curt, observational reports, set to music almost going out of its way to be unobtrusive: brisk, regular and soft-edged, embellished by noises akin to passing cars (with just the faintest whiff of Autobahn). The hinge point comes in the refrain, where the song abruptly takes off, Ryser’s voice soaring. It’s unsettling because this moment of apparent elation is aligned with the troubling refrain, “What we watch for at day / We become at night”. Watching again, and with it the notion of daytime passivity and caution – as in ‘More Alike’ and ‘Sidewalk Reel’, with their imitation and conformity – answered by action taking place under a necessary cover of darkness. There’s real insecurity and identity crisis encapsulated here, exacerbated in the final verse twist, where watching is pushed into surveillance: “we are watched / Watch each other like the clock”. Individuality curtailed by fear, exercised – if at all – out of sight.
‘Straight Lines’ (a title John Foxx might well have used on Metamatic) rounds off the album’s large-scale critique by lamenting at the regularity – of routine, appearance, mental attitude – of the modern world. The song progresses from mere observation to immersion, engaging a more probing sensiblity: “I walk around the streets / And listen to what they’re saying / Trying to think / Of what’s missing”. There’s something of Gary Numan in the potent but held-back music – like energy being released under strict controls – as well as the way lyrically it turns back (and arguably all emanates from) the self. Two verses in and there’s no chorus yet to deviate from the verses’ stare, the music’s stasis. All of which makes verse three so shocking: “I put a scar on my face / I gave myself a physical change / Now everyone knows / What I stand for”. A violent act of self-harm as a way of breaking through the surface (of both the physical body and body politic), injecting sensory disruption and intensity into an otherwise remote dissociation. It also – considering the specifics of the album’s critiques – makes a mark that goes emphatically against conformity and similarity. Here, in the penultimate track, Units go beyond and beneath surfaces into something deeper; not a solution, as such, but at least a reaction. Only now does the chorus come: “Were there straight lines … Before man came around?” Halfway through, the lyrics have ended, and the synths take over, given space to speak – and us time to ruminate – as the beats impassively chug along.
While ‘Straight Lines’ would have worked well as an album closer, Animals They Dream About ends by switching attention from the universal to the personal, in the process significantly intensifying everything. ‘Jack’ is brisk and pounding, practically reduced to just beats and voice (Webber and Ryser together), it taps into something of Suicide’s powerfully reductive and relentless homing-in on a subject. And not just sonically, lyrically too; there are evocations here of Suicide’s ‘Johnny’ (Jack is a variant of John, of course), but also of Units’ own song ‘High Pressure Days’ (on Digital Stimulation), where another Johnny appears as a brief flicker of recognition lost in the relentless movement of societal activity. Where Suicide sang of admiration, Units start out ostensibly the same – “Though he doesn’t do anything but give his opinion / You have to respect the fact / That Jack is cool and cool people know best” – but it ends up turning sour. “Can he keep up with the pace?” – there’s something triumphal about the takedown; the beats are intensified, pitch and noise swirl around, the voices pitch locked, unwavering, laser-sighted. Again the lyrics are exhausted halfway through, and while echoes of “Run Jack run” resound, pitch too is now redundant, the song and the album thundering to its end in a barrage of implacable percussive regularity.
Completed in 1981, finally released in 2016, Animals They Dream About is available on CD – expanded with a collection of live tracks – and vinyl from Futurismo; there’s also a curiously re-ordered download available (with one bonus track) from the group’s Bandcamp.
