The Unit Ama take their time. They act on their own terms. 

This applies to their music and their work-rate. Two albums and a handful of singles in twenty years. Sporadic gigs. No endless Bandcamp messages or weekly mailing list updates. Rare missions outside their native north-east. 

Toward is their second studio album and their second Gringo release. It’s not their ‘pandemic’ album but does see the band considering the important things: post-traumatic growth, insight through experience. Utilising the past to navigate towards a meaningful future. 

Toward was self-produced and will probably get tagged as post-hardcore which is fair enough. But it’s also informed by post-punk, jazz and folk, and by working closely together for two decades. The Unit Ama play in other incarnations that inform their music and the way they dismantle expectations of the rock trio. There’s as much Richard Thompson as Minutemen. 

Toward takes the exploratory, explosive sound of their debut and adds twenty years of living and listening. Toward is eight tracks that are thoughtful and intricate without losing any impact. This is gut music as much as it is head music. The Unit Ama never let their abilities get in the way of their instincts and Toward is full of surging urgency and roaring anxiety. But there are moments of brooding calm too, and a song – Mary – that could be stripped down and sold as a folk ballad.

Support 

Yakka Doon

Oak-aged heartcraft from the pitscarred heathland of County Durham. Starkfelt sketchings of lifespaces through flat vowels and strictly necessary guitar-bedding.

http://yakkadoon.bandcamp.com/

Molar Crimes 

These two young dukes play the percussion/objects (Chlorine) and the dictaphone/objects (Posset). That's clear. That's naturally obvious. 

But sweep away the soot, brush away the leaves and there is something breathing down there. What's breathing? What's huffing in the Oxygene? it's a system of tubes and levers, rubbery and sweating. The tubes pulse, they wriggle with a cumin-scented gas. If you lean in you can smell the dusty fumes. Grab a lever and pull. What's released? A fine sound. A sound sizzling like a greasy grill. A sound as fresh as autumn mornings, ripe with both promise and decay. Old worlds hum into life, ferns unfold. The saturated colour of a de-tuned TV blitz each eyeball making it fizz...horns swoop up and around into dry cotton-mouthed clouds. Sherbet crackles in the Kool Aid...a piano is detuned via mouldy fingers. Gears lock and then miss-fire - the machine delicately malfunctions. It's a Jazz thing if your Jazz is heard though soil-clogged earholes, worms crawling between your lips and teeth. That's more fun eh?  (from chocolate monk site)