Love, Whoa Love, You Wanna Survive

Sometimes life weighs heavy. Solution 1: Head on

And you should've told me
You had another fuckin' break down   (Nervous)

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I felt like some loud tonight. I felt like something completely unsubtle, reckless and touching on the hysterical. You know, the train that accelerates into the station not caring, not feeling, just wanting some of that sweet terminal velocity kick.

Have some Unida Coping With The Urban Coyote. Choo, choo!

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I first got into Unida, ooh, when was my Audiogalaxy phase? when a fairly new-to-the-music-internet me discovered all manner of great stoner rock that was physically impossible to find over here, even if you had the money*, out of all the lesser known stoners like sHEAVY, The Mystick Krewe Of Clearlight, Five Horse Johnson and Priestess it was Unida that stuck with me the clearest.

It was a bit confusing but eventually I pieced together the history they were, like approximately 67.8% of US Westcoast bands, an offshoot of Kyuss. Specifically singer and songer John Garcia in this case, with Arthur Seay on guitar, Dave Dinsmore on bass and Miguel Cancino on drums. Named Unida, ‘United’ in Spanish, as a nod to half of the band’s Hispanic roots the band released a split EP before cutting Coping With The Urban Coyote in 1999 on Man’s Ruin Records.

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Unida first swing into earshot with ‘Thorn’, a steady heavy low-end mired in plenty of fuzz and Garcia’s slightly pained, hysterical vocals – he always seems to sing a little like a man who has trapped himself in his zip, but is having to attend to something even more pressing before releasing himself**. I love how you only get snatches of words coming through, all I get from this is:

Love, whoa love, you wanna survive!
Love, whoa love, you wanna survive!

Not quite Cole Porter but Garcia sings it not only like he means it, but like a swain thwarted in love, with the utter force and conviction that nobody has ever meant it so much before.

The winner for me is ‘Black Woman’ a hurtling vehicle formed from pure hysteria and some astonishingly good playing. I read the lyrics especially for you chaps and lady chaps and I am still absolutely none the wiser. Never mind, just buckle up and enjoy the ride. Huge bonus points here for Dinsmore’s pounding bass playing and the way the song gets louder and faster all the way through.

Full on brain shake.

Unida have a certain formula and by golly do they stick to it for the rest of Coping With The Urban Coyote, to great affect it must be said^, revving up, or revving down the speed with all the needles in the red and the wailing cranked to critical. There’s not an ounce of criticism intended there either, you just have to abandon yourself to it.

Some songs are meaner than others ‘Nervous’ (which boasts some epic guitaring), some songs are more belligerent ‘Dwarf It’ and some build over 9 minutes to epic levels of heavy, ‘You Wish’.

The playing throughout is never less than immense and focused, stoner rock this may be but nobody involved is playing it fuzzy around the edges. The production by the band and Steve Feldman is perfect, clear enough, murky enough, just killer.

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It was never really to be for Unida of course. They signed to American Recordings, cut a second LP with George Drakoulis producing and Scott Reeder (of Kyuss, not Fu Manchu, fame) on bass and everything looked peachy.

Sadly label politics intervened via Rick Rubin and it has yet to see the light of day officially, although certain bad boys and girls may have an illegally downloaded copy somewhere. Its bloody good too, or so I hear.

The band split and then reformed many years later with all the line-up changes that usually entails/entrails. I would like to see them but for me Unida will always be the final few minutes of ‘Black Woman’ hurtling towards the buffers, braced for that blissful impact.

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My copy of Coping With The Urban Coyote is not a treasured original worth a million bucks but a 2022 reissue on green vinyl with a second LP of live recordings from 2013^. Take it away John.

You got it on, you got it on
Get it get it you got it
Black woman yeah

1231 Down.

*which I very much did not. Interestingly though, due to my collector’s genes I have managed to buy most of what I once downloaded for free many years ago. I always regarded music sharing sites as a try-before-you-buy deal, although I quite appreciate that without my obsessiveness it really was an artist rip-off for most people.

**a charging herd of bison? today’s Wordle? an urgent tax declaration?

^can I confess I haven’t listened to the last bit yet?