I Was Born (A Unicorn)

Deliberately, gleefully lo-fi — recorded with the kind of fidelity that sounds like a choice rather than a limitation, all thin drums and buzzing organ and vocals that seem to arrive from behind a slightly closed door. The Unicorns made music that felt like it was decomposing and regenerating simultaneously, and this song is a perfect example: structurally strange, tonally wobbly, somehow catchy despite resisting every convention of catchiness. The vocal delivery is arch and deadpan, committed to its own absurdist mythology, performing sincerity about something inherently ridiculous with enough conviction to pull it off completely. The lyric constructs a logic of magical self-identity, an insistence on one's own specialness that reads as both parody and genuine belief — the two things coexisting without tension. Culturally it sits in the Montreal underground of the early 2000s, that scene of bands making strange, funny, emotionally unpredictable music that didn't care much whether it was liked. It has the energy of something invented by teenagers in a basement who had listened to too much Guided by Voices and not enough pop radio and considered that a point of pride. You'd reach for this when you want music that makes you slightly uncertain whether you're being laughed at or laughed with, and find you don't mind either way.