Unicorns Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

I've heard that in times of heightened pleasure, one's toes may curl. Even 50 Cent rapped about making toes curl in one of his ubiquitous urban hits last summer. Now my body reacts to pleasure in all kinds of physiological ways, but never in this form. I made $250 on one hand in Vegas last week, and though there was certainly a bit of yelling, my toes remained immobile as stone. In fact, I'm sitting here forcing my toes to curl, and I'm not really enjoying it. I find the additional strain on my arches disconcerting. But, if my body were to react to aural pleasure in such a way, The Unicorns' Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? could cause permanent damage to my metatarsal region.

The Unicorns write the kind of hooks that combine pop joy with a sense of unfocused brilliance. They convince the listener that anyone could pick up a guitar and bash out a hit in ten minutes - though I just tried (merely for research's sake), and am proud to announce that I got an emphatic endorsement from my rapt audience - my downstairs neighbor expressed his pleasure with my musical proclivities by banging sharply on his ceiling. But I must warn you: this success is derived mostly from my inherent ability to rock, and therefore most results will be mixed, to say the least.

The Unicorns have so many hooks to spare, they rarely play them twice. Every time you get comfortable, they skip from programmed beats to solo acoustic guitar, detour into a keyboard riff, and finally end with call and response vocals on any subject ranging from washed-up child stars to mythical beasts to United States foreign policy to nonsense about driving a "bone Camaro." Instruments abruptly shift in and out of the mix behind endearingly off-kilter melodies that poke fun at timeless themes of loss and death and the contraction of a condition called Jellybones.

In a nod to concept albums, they start off with a track entitled We Don't Want To Die and hastily end with Ready to Die and have a series of three songs about ghosts. Or something. Quirky doesn't even begin to describe it. Strange is too pedestrian. But for all the pop experimentation that goes on here, the Unicorns strike a curious balance with more accessible moments, such as I Was Born (A Unicorn) and the pulsating Tuff Ghost, which contains one of the more interesting guitar solos in recent history.

There aren't many musical reference points that do the album justice. If anything, the Unicorns resemble the poppier side of Ween's catalogue, the sound of several musical styles colliding, tenuously being held together by a bouncy keyboard line or drum roll. What would normally just be a fun, successful foray into pop music takes on other dimensions thanks to the Unicorns' haphazard view of song structure. Never satisfied with songs created within a verse-chorus-verse format, the Unicorns shift parts so many times I occasionally had to look at my CD player to see if I was still listening to the same song. Perhaps the less retarded won't have this problem, but I'm not ashamed.

As for specific songs, highlights include the funky keyboards of Jellybones and I Was Born, where the band asks the question, "How come all the other unicorns are dead?" Tuff Luff comes on like a deranged zydeco song, before incorporating a few measures of white-boy hip-hop, before featuring a flute melody straight out of a children's song. At least, I think it's a flute. With these guys, it's best not to make too many assumptions.

The Unicorns' Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? defines indie-pop, laden with hooks boasting a charmingly lo-fi sound devoid of pretensions and true to whatever whimsy their muse has stricken them with. It is not to be missed, unless you're the type of person who enjoys missing out on awesome things. But that's just weird. Don't be weird.