PREMIERE // Unicorns At Heart

Each generation has a soft spot for the record keeping of its youth. The way Super 8 cameras made a comeback among artsy Gen-Xers, and boomers still pull out the old slide projector every so often.

In some ways the millennial affection for the formats that raised us (VHS, cassette) makes less sense, because the quality is objectively so much worse than that which came either before or after it. I watch old home movies, my whole childhood rendered a mere 480 pixels across, and the picture is comprised of shaky interlacing bands, susceptible to damage, corruption, noise. Scrubby faces barely recognizable except via context clues (is that Aunt Roz in the background? What year was it?)

But there’s something comforting about it, about slipping the cassette into its slot and knowing that everything has changed and nothing has changed all at once. Something about how the VHS tape distills whole years into wandering 5 minute chunks of birthday parties and t-ball games zoomed way into the outfield. The way the timeline stops abruptly and picks up 5 months later, following an internal sort of logic which charmingly mixes up the important and the forgotten.

I love how we upload VHS dubs to YouTube and eschew streaming services for cassette tapes. I don’t understand it and I won’t try to explain it but I love it.

This album, with its soft edges and meandering, sketch-like texture, has the same sort of power. It’s not nostalgic, exactly, but fragile all the same. Melodies roll along askance, off kilter, only to be snapped back into alignment disarmingly. “Jangly” would be a good descriptor, but with a touch more melancholy.

The first listen is lovely, but the second and third is where the gems really begin to shine. On my last go around, the standout was “My Eyes At The Moment”, a 90 second interlude consisting of a single guitar chord strummed again and again, and different lo-fi samples playing simultaneously in the left and right channel. This is a bad description; it sounds like it would be a cacophonous mess, but it isn’t. Like tracking lines rolling down a picture of one’s youth, it’s soothing and evocative in a way that’s tough to pin down.

Unicorns At Heart are like unicorns, but only at heart. (According to their Soundcloud bio.) The charming trio are from Monrovia, CA, and we are honored to be streaming their debut self titled album ahead of its official release on October 29th, via Hidden Bay Records. Buy the cassette here!