Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

The Unicorns’ schtick isn’t very difficult to see through; they’re grown adults writing children’s songs for grown adults.

It’s improbably refreshing to hear musicians that were clearly weaned on Frank Zappa, Supertramp and ELO messing things up and having a laugh.

A consistent, immediately catchy album that holds up after repeated listens.

They rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely.

Those without a stomach for a little humor in their music will surely thumb their noses, but for everyone else, this is essential listening: a whip-smart band of originals, living with death, throwing coconuts at the rest of us from greener pastures.

Genuinely great pop music that's experimental, catchy, and, most of all, weird.

The Unicorns manage to polish an array of pawn shop instruments into miniature masterpieces.

Although much of the album sounds amateurish, and sometimes painfully so, the Unicorns regularly remind us that it's all shtick.

The Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? defines indie-pop, laden with hooks boasting a charmingly lo-fi sound devoid of pretensions and true to whatever whimsy their muse has stricken them with.

It's the sound of people having fun. [4 Dec 2004, p.55]

The mood is buoyant, the instrumentation is varied and the childlike naivety runs rampant throughout.