Run your little finger along your eyebrows

Here’s a band that was so influential that I don’t even know how to start describing their sound without sounding completely redundant, so I am going to let others do the talking. As Ebullition puts it, the music of Uranus represented “chaos, fury, emotional strife, and a paranoid fear of a technocratic future all blended with a musical delivery that is equivalent to total sonic insanity.” According to Collective Zine, Uranus sounded “like crawling through a sewer pipe on your belly, elbow deep in shit and muck while hungry rats the size of small dogs brood all around you, chattering among themselves while staving off the kill.”

Very well, but for all of you who, like me, have never crawled through a sewer pipe, Paranoid Android offers a more analytic description. After branding the beginning of ‘Panacea’ a “heavy up-tempo verse that marries the locked groove of metallic hardcore with the floating, frantic feeling of Gravtiy Records-style chaotic emo,” the writer continues: “This is all good enough, but then something amazing happens. The drummer shifts his eighth-note accept pattern to the beginning of the measure [and] the second guitar responds with a riff of hollow chords and high octave jumps. At this point even though I've heard this song 100+ times my jaw always drops. It's a revolution in sound, as if the song and all he troubles that inspire it have been crushed under its/their own weight and something new is ready to bust out of the rubble, wounded but soaring, aware of its origins yet ready to look beyond them. The song eventually settles down into a closing riff, but for a few seconds it shows the promise of a world full of new possibilities, which is all one can ask of art.”

Derrida, may his white halo of hair rest in piece, couldn’t have put it any better (though he would almost certainly have been much more verbose).

For a comparison, Delusions of Adequacy suggests that “if you like bands such as Orchid, Majority Rule, Kaospilot, Shikari, or His Hero Is Gone, do yourself a favor and go buy this right now. You won’t be disappointed. Uranus will tear your ears to shreds […] I suggest that if you are prone to heart attacks, you don’t go anywhere near this record, because it will fucking kill you.”

All I can add to this are the facts: Uranus were from Canada, their entire output was recorded in 1993 and 1994 and consisted of the Disaster by Design double 7”, from which the two songs below are taken, the split LP with His Hero Is Gone, a split 7” with Immortal Squad and a Negative Approach cover. While the vinyl is going to set you back a fairly large amount of money, if you can find it at all, all of their music has been conveniently re-issued on one CD by Feral Ward (formerly called Great American Steak Religion) and Stonehenge Records. I suggest you pick up a copy while they’re still available, if you haven’t done so yet.

Uranus – Face Value
Uranus – Panacea