Grand Unified Theory

An infant-care nurse, a soon-to-be PhD student at MIT, and an unemployed kid with a versed intellect in cognitive science aren't the first things that come to mind when people think of rock musicians. Nonetheless, these are the members of Grand Unified Theory, a three-piece hailing from Berkeley, CA. Their self-titled debut is a thoughtful record that pours their interests into songs that are immediate, poignant, and cinematic, songs about the futility of originality, the meaning of success, mob mentality, the curse of art, and the trappings of corporate culture. "The band is too loose and frayed around the edges to be claimed under the ever-popular banner of emo, yet their songs have a calculated dissonance to them that makes them too complicated to be written off only as some post-Pavement collegiate indie act ...The quiet-loud, soft-hard dynamics of the Theory's self-titled debut call to mind the complex signatures of another California band, A Minor Forest, as much as they do Rodan or early June of '44, but the inviting recklessness of the disc distances itself from the careful and plotted navigation of post-rock." --Justin Vellucci, Delusions of Adequacy