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VARIABLE UNIT (VU)
Handbook For The Apocalypse (Widehive)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
I found a little cardboard CD case with a 4-song EP stacked up in my review pile with a bunch of other cardboard CD cases, most of them housing CDs with music that could be charitably termed anonymous. VU. Variable Unit. Remember both names because who knows which they'll become known by, but they WILL become known. I'm very lucky to have found that CD. It excited me, caused me to call the label and ask if there would be more than the 4 songs, which led them to send me the full CD, which led me to listen and listen, to absorb and try to catch every line of thought and stream of consciousness. The music, which they're actually playing and not sampling from other people, is extraordinarily catchy, funky, groove music people will want to call acid jazz, and I can't stop 'em because they're just as right as they are wrong. That genre has such a broad definition almost anything can be pulled in. This may belong there. The music has elements of jazz, funk and rock, and the vocalists aren't following the usual paths of hip-hop. Its roots are more in the coffee houses of the beat era, where jazz accompanied spoken word compositions of serious social import. VU takes on racial profiling, terrorism and World War III, prefacing each message with a musical groove deep enough to plant the seeds where they can't help but grow.
When I only had the 4-song EP, I thought no song in the world could top "I Am On A Journey To My Soul, But The Police Just Pulled Me Over," an amazing piece that is as surreal in its delivery as it is dead-on real in its content, the end result being a scenario you can't get out of your head and a few things you hadn't thought of in this certain way before now permanently with you. This isn't a mindless "fuck every cop for being a cop" record, this is about dealing with the "Who are you... What kind of name is THAT... How did you get into this country" mentality so prevalent right this very minute.
It's a devastating, thought process-changing song I figured couldn't be topped, until I received the full-length CD and heard "Walking With My Son." His son says "Pop... Man, how'd it come to be like this." To which pop replies "I tell him we were victims of insidious idiots soliciting innocent immigrants to integrate irrational nationalism to colonize the mind state. Hindsight highlights the high rate of 'heil.' Hail to the thief. Unabashedly fascists make their way through the matrix of mayhem and mediocre men, amended civil liberties to legitimize piracy on our privacy, the only thing that was still free was speech." This is the tip of the ice burg, as Pop tells junior exactly what's going on in vivid detail, only we're junior. These are very bright people with sage-like qualities. They have a lot to teach. Pick up a copy of Handbook For The Apocalypse: A Hitchhiker's Guide Through The Conflict soon, because there's much to learn.
© 2003 - DJ Johnson