Live at WFMU on Brian Turner's Show, 7/20/10 Radio Program

Certainly one of the cornerstones of U.S. 90's indie rock, Washington DC's Unrest evolved from schizophrenic postpunk roots into finely crafted, texture-heavy, somewhat Brit-reverent, experimental pop music. Records like Malcolm X Park and Imperial FFRR earned them a heavy fan base and eventual gravitation onto 4AD records by 1993 after a huge discography of homegrown releases on leader Mark Robinson's Teenbeat record label. They disbanded in 1994, did one reunion show in 2005, and return with the lineup of Robinson, Bridget Cross, and Phil Krauth for a Teenbeat 26th Anniversary tour. While en route from Philly to Maxwells in Hoboken, Unrest made a pitstop on WFMU for Brian Turner's July 20th show for an electric/acoustic set that got the airwaves' collective heads bobbing, they even threw in an ESG cover ("UFO") and surprised us with a live version of Imperial FFRR's tranced-out headphone blaster "Firecracker". A nice cross-section of the hits indeed, thanks to Unrest and engineers Jason Sigal and David Van Dokkum.