Parts and Labor

Univox drops its lush and textured debut. Finally.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: May 25, 2010

Univox

[ rock/pop ]

When Univox released its eponymous debut CD last month, one question immediately came to mind:

What took so long?

"When you're striving to survive, the years just fly by," laughs Josh Jones, guitarist and baritone singer.

Univox, the brusque Philadelphia art-pop quartet known for its lush four-part harmonies, has been around for five years and counting.

That's a long time to sit on music like this. Each and every song the band — that's principal songwriters Jones and Joe Bonaventura III (guitar/alto singer) along with Rob DeCarolis (bass/tenor) and Kent Boersma (drums/soprano) — sets its mind to is contagious as hell. Their crusty power-driven pop, which incorporates the noisily melodic elements of Sonic Youth with the frenetic splintered pace of The Stooges and a touch of Motown swing, is easily imaginable coming from car windows on a summer's night.

If that sounds a bit fractured, it leads us to the real reason it took Univox so long to release a full album. "It was essentially done piece by piece," says Bonaventura. "The time between sessions for this record is literally years."

Jones has known Boersma since childhood. They drew together, made movies together and, at age 15, started writing and playing music together. "We were a twosome," says Jones. "I played guitar and Kent sang. Our first show was with Joe's band, Fuzzbucket. They really blew up our heads. They were our age, but they were doing a full-on Sonic Youth pastiche, with the alternate tunings on every song, and anti-chorus/verse/chorus songwriting structure."

"Fuzzbucket was more about a 'sheets of sound' idea, in that guitars would cascade and rise in a fury of fuzz with feedback squalls and atonal harmony," recalls fan and friend Bonaventura, talking about what sounds like My Bloody Valentine. "Somewhere in the middle of all that was a pop tune."

Bonaventura and Jones began Univox as a mature take on that Fuzzbucket concept, with a much more intense focus on song craft and group tightness. Boersma joined up after studying animation at UArts. "To not have had Kent in the band would be a great disadvantage," notes Bonaventura. "He can play drums like a wolverine on acid, and sing like an angel on chamomile."

In May 2009, Univox signed to ROIR, the one-time cassette-only-imprint that famously released music by punk, no wave and dub gods like Bad Brains, The Contortions, Suicide and Television.

"Signing a band is tricky as there's supposed to be long conversations about marketing, viability, monetization," says ROIR CEO Nick Cooper. "When I heard Univox's demo, all that shit went right out the window. I played it the way a teenage girl plays with her hair — all day long, day after day. How can one not sign a band that has that effect on you?"

The quartet brought Philly uber-producer Bill Moriarty to guide the sessions for Univox, after countless new songs had been written and recorded. At last count, they'd taped enough material for four additional albums. Despite this massive wealth of tunes, it's one of the quartet's earliest that Jones calls the defining U-vox smash.

"'Lever Master City' is a quintessential Univox song," he says. "In the beginning, we spent a lot of time together whittling away at our options, covered a lot of genres. I wrote that song in a fever. Didn't know what any of the words meant, but they all rang true. The rest of the band got as excited as I was and everything fell into place. We started dropping the songs we had been doing before that and pushing further in the direction of 'Lever Master's' sound. That was in 2005, so, for us at least, a lot of the luster has worn, but the ending still gets me every time."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Univox plays Thu., May 27, 7 p.m., $10, with Fang Island, Barbary, 951 N. Frankford Ave., 877-435-9849, r5productions.com.

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