In honor of gay pride month and their upcoming 7-inch on World Famous, here’s a fan video of their hit song. Painstakingly assembled from thousands of Funniest Polish Home Videos by Elton Tom & Jeremy Smears. Enjoy!
Its, like, totally cosmic out here on the internets. Synergy! I just posted about a bunch of SF synth punk and then looking through our myspace bulletins I see that The Units have posted five versions of ‘High Pressure Days’, my favorite song by them. Not for download though, sad. I guess its kind of cool, but I did start to hate that song towards the end.
There’s:
the 1979 single version, which is rawer and came in a stamped white paper sleeve. No frills! So punk! Its awesome and is my favorite version.
The 1980 album version which is a cleaner. I like the backing vocals on this one better, and also its the first version I heard and I don’t like ‘changes’.
weird 1981 remix that doesn’t do much for me.
A live 1982 version which I kind of hated at first but now I kind of love. The live drums are gone and its definitely a bit more commercial sounding, which is the path this band chose to pursue. Generally its not worth bothering with anything after their first LP, Digital Stimulation, which came out in 1980 — trust me, I have a few less than awesome 12 inches. But this live version works. It survives the loss of drums and the more dancey synth lines that have been thrown in are interesting because they’re not up front and I don’t feel like I’m watching some late night network TV broadcast trying to show me the ‘weird’ new music with bad dancers.
a 2007 remix that doesn’t do much for me.
Also, poking around I saw found The Units Training Film #1, which I guess they screened at shows and was constantly being edited so it was never ‘finished’. Wow! Like, how did they do that? There wasn’t even iMovie:
Finally, these Units characters have been busy. There’s a reissue/singles comp coming out sometime on www.community-library.net. Ok, enough synthpunk!
