Since its formation in 1989, New York City punk/metal trio Unsane has been on the receiving end of life’s harshest punishments, including the 1992 death of founding drummer Charlie Ondras and the 1998 near-fatal beating of singer/guitarist Chris Spencer. But Unsane has always come back with grinding, noise-powered counterpunches; the group’s latest, Visqueen (Ipecac), sounds like Helmet with more balls and a thirst for blood.
Unsane has a long tradition of creating album covers that go beyond shock-value gore and instead offer meticulously staged—and sometimes real—homicide art. Spencer explains the madness behind his band’s massacre scenes.
Unsane (1991)
This album cover was a photo that was given to our (former) bassist, Pete Shore, by a friend who worked for the New York Police Department. It’s a real photo of this guy in Union Square who got pushed in front of a subway train by a little kid. He fell and was decapitated. Pete had been holding onto that picture for three or four years, so the color of the blood in the photo looks slightly fake. We wanted to use that picture forever, and we figured our first record would be the right time.
Lambhouse: The Collection 1991-1998 (2003)
We wanted to do the full-on, bloodbath, Evil Dead thing. At the same time, it was like a guerrilla hit where we had three or four different photographers with us and everybody sat in our van while I went out with rubber gloves and hosed down the walls of the building, which was an old Catholic school. I poured blood into a Kool-Aid pitcher, then would fling it up as high as 10 feet on the wall. There’s a waterfall of blood coming down the stairs. And this is out in Brooklyn, where cars are driving by. My friend Phil Sandbo was cool enough to lie face down in massive amounts of blood. The whole ethic is a guerrilla-style death scene, where you go and set something up and you’re out of there in 10 minutes before the cops roll up.
Blood Run (2005)
We get this cow’s blood from a bulk-quantity meat place over on the West Side. They’re cool with me. They probably figure I’m some kind of Satanist—nothing too bad. At least I’m not killing anything. So I buy six gallons of cow’s blood in plastic jugs that’s ordinarily used as chum for shark-fishing. It took a lot of blood to fill that tub. The girl in the photo is a friend who very nicely volunteered to lie down in cow’s blood for a couple hours. The shoot took place in the bathroom of my apartment. For this record, our distributor made us use a cardboard sleeve (with alternate cover art depicting a razorblade). Surprisingly, that was the first time we ever had to do that.
Visqueen (2007)
This was shot in Northern California on my brother’s piece of land by James Rexroad, the same photographer who did Lambhouse and Blood Run. After doing so many urban and interior shots, we wanted to do something out in the middle of nowhere, where a body’s just been ditched, wrapped in plastic out in the middle of a field. “Visqueen” is what they call that sheet plastic. It’s all real blood. That’s our m.o. Ethically, I would never do anything with corn syrup and food coloring. Part of what’s fucked up and weird about it is to have someone lie in real blood for any period of time. It smells bad, especially when it’s getting old and coagulated and chunky.
—interview by Matthew Fritch
