Review: Unknown Instructors - "Funland"
In the long and seasoned musical careers Mike Watt and George Hurley have jointly commandeered -- from the Reactionaries to the Minutemen, the Bootstrappers, fIREHOSE, and the Unknown Instructors heard here -- there is a spirit of exploration and perpetual breakthrough that miraculously never seems to cease. Sprouting from the original seeds of the Southern California punk scene, the pair and their co-conspirators throughout the years have grown the branches of their musical tree, swaying into such forms as jazz, art rock and experimental improvisation without ever disconnecting from the roots. At first it seems that Funland might run contradictory to the preceding pedestrian analogy. The drumless, bassless “Maji Yabai” opens the disc with nothing but a sauntering jazz guitar lead and Watt’s thick, croaky spiel, musing semi-animatedly like a working-class beat poet: “Maybe transcend a brutal reality / I guess it was time undefined / You can dance with your mind, Maji Yabai.” This is, h