Pitchfork: Ex-Unicorns Spill Guts About Breakup, New Band

Ex-Unicorns Spill Guts About Breakup, New Band

Although the Unicorns predicted their own demise plenty of times on their debut album, 2003's Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, most fans were still surprised when the band broke up late last year. In fact, many folks thought it was all a big joke. Alas, this was not the case.

Alden "Ginger" Penner and Nick "Niel" Diamonds, two-thirds of the Canadian fractured-pop trio, recently spoke to Pitchfork about their band's demise. "There were a lot of factors, personal and political," said Penner. "I've always wanted to play music and have it available to other people in a way that's a lot more associated with punk music or even folk music and not so involved in a business. And there were differing point of views about that. That's the trouble with being in a band."

"That's true and that's not true," Diamonds responded. "We all had the same goals in doing things a certain way. [Penner] took it to an extreme and Jaime [Tambour, the third Unicorn] and I didn't want to go with him that way. Having a label, having a manager, having a booking agent--he wanted to do it all himself. We didn't want to put our energy into that. I love Alden, I respect what he does to the fullest extent, and I love his music. As partners we just couldn't do it. We had different outlooks." He added, "It was kind of a messy breakup."

Diamonds explained that the band had been on shaky ground since the very beginning, as he and Penner always felt more like musical collaborators than friends. A nonstop touring schedule that saw the Unicorns visiting Europe, Australia, and North America multiple times in one year didn't help either. Diamonds and Penner didn't talk at all during their Australian tour, and their partnership dissolved soon after. Diamonds recalls their last show, in Texas: "We played in Houston and it was just so obvious that it was our last show. It was a dark finale. We did a screw version of 'Tuff Ghost' and chopped it up live. That was fun."

Diamonds and Penner spoke to each other for the first time since the breakup just last week, when Penner asked Diamonds' hip-hop project Th' Corn Gangg to DJ a fundraiser for the Head and Hands non-profit health center in Montreal, where Penner works as events coordinator. Penner wants to heal the rift between the two: "We started slowly. We're just trying to be more gentle," he said. "And that takes time. We're trying to be more general about the things we talk about and not so intensely musical or otherwise."

But don't cross your fingers for a Unicorns reunion just yet, as both Diamonds and Penner are already horn-deep in other musical projects. As Pitchfork reported back in June, Diamonds and Tambour have been working together under the name Islands, with a pair of songs, "Abominable Snow" and "Flesh" already leaked online. Diamonds revealed that Islands' debut album, Islands Return To The Sea has been completed, and will be out on Rough Trade in Europe sometime between October and January. The band is currently deciding on a North American label and filling out the rest of their lineup to begin touring. They will make their live debut at the Pop Montreal festival on September 28, opening for Beck at the Bell Centre.

Diamonds dropped some hints about what to expect from the Islands album: "We're big Paul Simon Graceland fans, so there's a bit of a Graceland vibe. There's some dancehall influences, some calypso. We're just trying to get away from rock music and indie rock specifically, and make pop music. It's really much more varied than the Unicorns ever were. It's more diverse and sprawling and ambitious." He also added that a Th' Corn Gangg album is in the works.

In the meantime, fans thirsty for a taste of that trademark Unicorns zaniness can check out "Do They Know It's Halloween?", a part-spoof, part-tribute to those grand, overblown charity songs we're all so familiar with, written by Diamonds and Adam Gollner. What started as a goofy idea has blossomed into an actual all-star UNICEF benefit single, to be released by Vice Recordings as a digital download on October 4 and as a CD and vinyl single on October 11. Diamonds and Gollner recorded the song with Redd Kross' Steven McDonald producing, and then solicited vocals from a galaxy of famous friends, including Beck, Karen O, Thurston Moore, Peaches, Devendra Banhart, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne of the Arcade Fire, David Cross, Malcolm McLaren and Leslie Feist. So basically it's an indie version of Live Aid.

Penner has also been keeping busy, working on the score for the film The Hamster Cage, by acclaimed Canadian director Larry Kent, which premieres at the Montreal World Film Festival tonight, August 26. The score features a variety of guest vocalists, including Richard Reed Parry from the Arcade Fire / Belle Orchestre. "The music is very inbred," he described. "A lot of the songs just kind of refer to one another. Part of that is just the fact that I only have a limited amount of creative material inside me, so a lot of it is self-referential." Hey, come to think of it" the Unicorns' stuff was pretty self-referential, too-- how many songs had "ghost" in the title?! Penner has also been working on solo material, which you can sample at http://www.secretunicornsforum.com (uhh... guess it's not so secret anymore). He plans to tour eventually-- stay tuned to Unicornfork... err Pitchfork for details.