Unschooling – ‘New World Artifacts’ review: a loud, glorious, unruly racket

5 October, 2023

unschooling

It’s always a thrill to hear a band on the brink of collapse. In punk, that feeling has traditionally had something to do with speed, and something else to do with aggression. But one of the most interesting gambits offered by post-punk and no wave was to introduce this rattling uncertainty as a design feature rather than a welcome byproduct, tamping down the chaos in favour of songs that might fall down around your ears only because they were supposed to.

On ‘New World Artifacts’, Unschooling‘s debut album, the band make wonderful use of this dynamic. Across a tight 30 minutes the five-piece, who come from Rouen in northern France, spin crystalline guitar melodies, sax, and detached vocals together with lurching time-signatures, their songs sometimes sliding into sound collages, or drones, or nothing at all.

On the strutting ‘Erase U’ there is something of Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in the interplay between guitarists Vincent Fevrier, Paul Morvant and Marc Lebreuilly, but as the competing hooks really begin to burrow beneath your skin they’re yanked free, overtaken for a second by a pillowy void. When they cut back through the fog it offers a fizzing catch and release payoff that is deeply satisfying.

The ensuing ‘Brand New Storm’ offers another glimpse of Unschooling’s willingness to play with melody as they stack lines atop one another in a scratchy information dump, only for the chorus to unfold over an almost pastoral, dreamlike lead. It’s as direct as they get, and all the more effective because it’s followed by the near seven-minute ‘Excommunicated’, a jagged shapeshifter of a song that refuses to settle in one spot, moving from stabbing chords to almost formless moments of quiet. The fact that both songs were selected by the band – completed by the rhythm section of bassist Damien Tebbal and drummer Thomas Fromager – as singles is unlikely to be a coincidence.

‘New World Artifacts’ makes use of moves that are more than four decades old but Unschooling show remarkable poise and control in bending them into unusual shapes. Having already sketched their intentions on a couple of short-form releases – 2019’s ‘Defensive Designs’ cassette and the following ‘Random Acts of Total Control’ EP – here they walk a tightrope, suggesting both the freedom to get weird and also the feeling that they’ve got this sound on a string.