Unrest: Perfect Teeth (30th Anniversary Edition) Album Review

In jangle-punk rippers and drum-free ballads alike, Perfect Teeth is driven by the madness of romantic desire. “Angel I’ll Walk You Home” is swooning and starry-eyed, its titular phrase repeated like a mantra. “So Sick” sketches the delirious spiral of unrequited love, circling the same basic desires until his own grammar breaks down (“All I want to do/Is staying up with you”), before finally professing that he would die for his nameless crush. Unrest were earnest but not innocent, and they wrote love songs from the perspective of perpetual adolescence. On “Six Layer Cake,” Robinson sings about intimacy like he’s getting away with murder, with “no hands where they ought to be.”

Perhaps the most enduring love song on the record, though, only took on its deeper significance in retrospect. “Make Out Club” starts simply, with Robinson slowly singing, “You were… the very first one,” before launching into Unrest’s characteristically feverish guitars. The song itches with youthful lust without tipping into lasciviousness, framing “making out all over me” as some kind of transcendent intimacy.

Six years after the release of Perfect Teeth, one fan took the song’s title as inspiration for a secret society of his own. In 1999, Gibby Miller, who would later go on to found Dais Records, started a social network for “indierockers, hardcore kids, record collectors, artists, bloggers, and hopeless romantics.” Users could create profiles under “Boys” or “Girls” and had the ability to add each other to “crush-lists.” Miller named the site makeoutclub.com, after the song that exemplified the desperate need to have your desires reciprocated by someone with the same taste as you.

On Perfect Teeth, Unrest made manifest the extremely uncool desires underpinning the ostensibly jaded world of rock, suggesting that even the most cynical scenesters really just want to belong to the Make Out Club. Robinson and his bandmates were as chameleonic as they were grounded in their roots; so many nights spent cataloguing their references could only lead to such heroic efforts to transcend them. On their final album, Unrest threw caution to the winds and invited twee, funk, hardcore, and jazz into their inner circle, remaking them all in the soft glow of their humbly homespun embrace.

Unrest: Perfect Teeth (30th Anniversary Edition)