“I’m obsessed with aesthetics / I need an an aesthetic, so please call me a medic / To get through” sings Andrew Cahak during I Survived the Cave – one of the many street-level snapshots from Unstable Shapes’ debut long-player, Delicate Machinery.
On their Bandcamp page, the Minneapolis, Minnesota collective (led by Cahak on vocals and joined by guitarists Mitch Gustafson and Ryan Jaroscak, bassist Kevin Hurley, and drummer James Taylor) claim they are “noisy post-whatever”. In a sense they are correct, taking all the best components of the “post” movement and smashing it together to form a rainbow collation that sounds beautifully throwback but equally tailored for these times.
Take the repetitious grooves that occupy the mind’s eye on the anthemic Flesh + Blood + Stars – something designed for the devoted few, and with a line like, “We can have to crash, and blame it on the race car driver”, it’s the kind of open-road glory that Swervedriver squeezed from the studio vaults in their heyday.
Essentially, Unstable Shapes’ are the conception of sprawling record and book collections. Cahak, well read as his influences jump off the sleeves throughout, led by opening track, Prince Kissinger, and later on Herzog Blues and The Local Sphinx where Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick are baked into these songs. And backed by a post-hardcore surge that rattles along the fault lines, these urgent bursts of noise tower above Cahak’s poetic narratives.
Unstable Shapes - Delicate MachineryWith the demonisation of art in this digital age, on Glass Ladder, Unstable Shapes pine for the past with a series of abstract first-thought-best-thought endeavours (“They don’t magazines like they used to… They don’t make diplomats like they used to… They don’t do shark attacks like they used to… They don’t to divorces like they used to”). In all its untethered beauty, Cahak dispenses something equally inventive and hypnotic.
And this continues on album highlight, Feral Joy – melodic proto-punk in the dream state, focusing on the desire of community, and it’s not the only time the band occupy this haven. While the Herzog Blues sees Cahak chisel out a character who wants to forget their past, those same fictional motifs feature on Sunlight – a dream-laden love song in the ether (“I know we’re gonna break each other / Because the weight of happiness makes me cry“). There’s something deeper in these tracks, too, as the band explores civic vitality and its decay amid Trump-era chaos. These songs, revealing the same darkness as American Motors’ Content.
On the blistering post-hardcore of You’ve Been Selected to Become Bones, as themes of managing catastrophic events continue to paint an accurate picture of these times (“My systems burning up / I’m dancing in the flames”), closing cut, Jaguar Jaws, sees Unstable Shapes sign off on said picture. Underpinned by wavering emotions, or in Cahak’s words, being “happiest in violence… loneliest in romance” and “gentlest in malevolence”, through their songs, Unstable Shapes brandish the frayed patchwork of life circa 2025. That hope and hopeless and how the human condition can swing so rapidly during any given day. As humans we are, indeed, delicate machinery, and Unstable Shapes explore that fragility to great effect on their debut release.
Delicate Machinery is out now via Learning Curve Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.
