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Unseen: Cashing The Reality Check
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 11-Oct-07 @ 04:37 PM|
While a lot of bands spend their time checking their SoundScans and box office receipts, THE UNSEEN are keeping themselves in check. Story by Mike Usinger Photos: Wade Gosselin At the beginning of this decade-for reasons that had more to do with where he was going in life than where he'd been-Unseen singer Mark Civaitarese began to think it was time to see a shrink. Looking back, the fantastically Mohawked frontman remembers being convinced he was starting to lose the war inside his head. His heart told him there was no better job in the world than getting paid to articulate his rage, something that he'd been doing for practically all of his adult life in Boston hardcore bands. His bank account, however, suggested that punk rock was leaving him nowhere even close to knocking Billie Joe Armstrong off the Fortune 500 list. "I've never done professional therapy, but I was at the point, five or six years ago, where I thought that maybe it would benefit me," says Civaitarese, better known to his fans as Mark Unseen. "I was going through a lot financially in my mid-20s, which is when a lot of people start to think about what they are going to do for the rest of their lives. I'd been on my own for a while, but it was like, 'I'm at a certain age where I need to think about what the fuck I'm going to do to provide for myself, and maybe a family someday.' That started to really fuck with me. It did something internally, like I was losing my mind. I had to do something to get myself on track." As tempting as therapy seemed, Civaitarese chose a different route, one which still works for him today. "Not to sound lame, but I kind of used music to get me through things," he says. "I'd jot down things that were bothering me and then sing about them, and that helped me to stop being a pussy. It was like, 'Snap out of it and do something about things because no one will do it for you.'" Consequently, if you want to know what's going on in Civaitarese's head these days, all you need to do is check out the Unseen's new album, Internal Salvation. Based solely on song titles like "At Point Break" and "Torn And Shattered (Nothing Left)," it's obvious that the singer's battle within is far from over. But at least he no longer feels like he's going crazy. Internal Salvation doesn't exactly start on a positive note. Quite intentionally, the album's opener, "The Brutal Truth," is uglier than Dick Cheney. As funeral-service organs give way to metal-circus guitars, samples lifted from the nightly news detail a litany of horrors: Fetuses ripped from their mother's wombs, children bludgeoned with two-by-fours, priests investigated for sexual abuse and religious-right psychopaths calling on God to kill all homosexuals. "I wanted 'Brutal Truth' to set the tone for the album," the singer reveals. "Musically, it starts out big 'cause it's kind of gloomy and dreary with the organs, but when the rest of the music kicks in, it's heavy, punk, a bit more upbeat, but still a bit depressing. The samples were chosen to tie into things that I think are fucked up in the world, which are things that I dwell on a lot on the record." Backed by bassist Tripp Underwood, drummer Pat Melzard and guitarists Scott Unseen and the mono-monikered Jonny, Civaitarese gets plenty off his chest on the new album, much of the material directly inspired by his own personal experiences. There's "At Point Break," a two-minute blur of galloping hardcore rhythms, straight-razor guitars and vocals which suggest it's time for the singer to lay off the battery acid. The song's emotional climax comes in the second verse, when Civaitarese howls, "She works so much she's at point break to save her kids/Their worthless father went away." Those lyrics become more than mere words once you know that Civaitarese's mother divorced and remarried when he was young, giving birth to three children with her new husband. When Civaitarese was in his early teens, his stepfather bailed, leaving his mom with a family that she could barely afford to raise. "The second verse [of that song] is about my mom almost killing herself, tiring herself out just to try to provide for her kids," he says. "So the song is kind of a tribute to her and a fuck-you to my old stepfather. "I dealt with a lot of stuff, between divorces and seeing other family members do a lot of fucked-up things," he continues. "I won't go into specifics or who they were in my family, but there were definitely people involved with heavy drugs who fucked up their lives and relationships with their kids because of it. I saw a lot of stuff growing up, and because of that I've become desensitized." Civaitarese's outrage on Internal Salvation doesn't stop at home. "Such Tragedy" examines the sexual abuse of kids within the Catholic church, while "Left For Dead" tackles human greed against the backdrop of the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Mostly though, the disc is a more inward-looking, less-politicized album than the Unseen's last effort, 2005's State Of Discontent, which found the 14-year-old band training their sights on G8 leaders and war-time profiteers. "Instead of State Of Discontent Part II, a lot of the songs this time are like, 'If times are really tough in my life, what do I do to make it better?'" Additionally, the lyrical focus isn't the only thing that's changed. Civaitarese has never made a secret of his desire for the Unseen to evolve with each release. Internal Salvation isn't going to totally turn off discerning street punks; the proudly old-school "Break Away" and "Let It Go" both deliver East Coast hardcore at its most corrosive and viciously unrelenting. Overall though, the guitars sound just a little cleaner, the songs more taut and focused. While Civaitarese still seems hell bent on shredding what's left of his vocal cords, he somehow manages the difficult task of making Molotov-cocktail hardcore sound melodic. The frontman credits the band's most recent enlistee, Jonny, with helping redefine the band's sound. "He definitely helped bring out things in the songs that wouldn't have been there otherwise," Civaitarese notes. "It was just good to have someone new and energetic walking into it with fresh ears, especially because he was a fan of the band before he joined. He wasn't just some guy we found on the street." Jonny joined the Unseen last year during the writing of Salvation. It's obvious what hd made him a long-time fan of the group; the guitarist matter-of-factly explains he grew up poor in the Boston area, which left him convinced the world is every bit as ugly as Civaitarese portrays it to be. "My father is a retired Navy man, and my mom works with the elderly, doing activities for them," the guitarist relates. "So there definitely wasn't big money there. I have an older brother and sister, and we were the white-trash dream. My sister got knocked up at 16, and my brother was a serious, serious drug addict at 16. As white trash, we stayed in our socio-economic placement." Punk rock helped Jonny make sense of where he came from. "It was an escape," he says simply. "That was my drug." Obviously, he's got something in common with Civaitarese. A half-decade after he worried he was starting to lose it, the singer confesses he still has his dark days. Even though he'd like to own his own home, that doesn't look likely at this point in his life. The trade-off for that, he figures, is that he's gotten to see places-Europe, Australia, Japan-that he never dreamed he'd visit as a kid being raised by a barely hanging-on single mom. But best of all, Civaitarese has the kind of job where every day offers a new chance to work through his problems. When asked whether he writes songs for himself or his fans, the singer doesn't pause before answering. As much as he's happy when an Unseen fan can relate to his lyrics, Civaitarese is, unapologetically, in it for himself. Listen closely to Internal Salvation, and you'll hear the sound of a man doing his best to silence the voices within. "I don't ever try to write something that I think is going to cure someone's problems," Civaitarese says. "In general, I'm trying to get down what I think will help me. It's therapy-I write to cure my own problems. And if kids can relate, then that's awesome." ALT |
