Unrest - Imperial f.f.r.r. (1992)
Artist: Unrest
Author: Sarah
Date: 05/25/2026
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words. - Matthew 6:7
Usually, I think of Unrest's indiepop era as something akin to the American equivalent of The Wedding Present, but sometimes, Imperial f.f.r.r. reminds me a bit more of Stereolab, actually. It's not really the specific way they sound, so much as it is the way Unrest are sort of gesturing at evoking a bygone era with reference to obsolete audio equipment, such as the receiver pictured on the cover, or with the "Volume Reference Tone" that starts the album, and the way they've retooled their sound in an attempt at becoming more hypnotic.
Of course, Stereolab's retro affectations are in the service of getting people to willingly listen to communist polemics, whereas with Unrest, it's initially a bit hard to see what the point of it all is. Instead of an agenda to push, what Unrest seems to be giving us is ultra-repetitive love songs. On this latest time listening to the album, I realized that maybe that's the whole point.
See, I don't think we're meant to understand Imperial f.f.r.r. as a quirky pop album, but rather as a commentary on the emptiness of pop music. For starters, the entirety of the album feels pretty lifeless: the guitar might be busy, but there's no character to it; Robinson might be saying a lot, but there's not much feeling in his voice. Instead of lyrics conveying real meaning, we get endless repetitions of cliches like "wanna be with you all the time" in "Suki", and that gets followed up with endless repetitions of "keep repeating", just to make sure we don't make the mistake of thinking the repetition is entirely in earnest.
Now, to be sure, "Suki" isn't the only song here. But we see this same trick get pulled over and over again (albeit without the "keep repeating" lampshading). In "I Do Believe You're Blushing", it's the exact same thing. In "Cherry Cream On", it's used to get at what all those pop singers really want from the women they're singing to, nothing more than the crude propositions of "Cherry come on, Cherry suck on". In "Imperial", they draw a comparison between the love song's "I can have her someday" and the imperialist's "burning out, killing and talking" (hey, maybe this is a Stereolab album, after all!)
I've honestly never particularly liked this album all that much; it always felt like they totally failed at writing credible pop songs. Now that I've realized that maybe that was the point all along, I guess I find it a bit more interesting to think about as a concept? Though for me, their greater acceptance of pop on Perfect Teeth is still their peak, even if they do sometimes find themselves uncritically perpetrating the same cliches there as they're criticizing here.