Blueboy – Unisex [LP]

"“All he ever wanted was a lover…”

The trilogy of Blueboy albums (If Wishes Were Horses, 1993; Unisex, 1994; The Bank of England, 1998) entered A Colourful Storm’s orbit almost twenty years after the fact. It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago, in the summer of 2015/16, Bayu would introduce to us music so heartfelt and invigorating it would completely change our musical trajectory. Today it’s hard to imagine the label’s existence without the presence of Blueboy, a group whose sincerity and unadorned tenderness encapsulated a joy, sadness, thrill and exhilaration we had almost left behind.

“Unisex isn’t only unique within the context of everything else Sarah Records released; it’s unique within the context of pop music as a whole. Musically and lyrically, I don’t know of another album quite like it.

If its words were unremarkable, we might still appreciate the elegance of the band’s playing, the sheer vision and audacity of having made an album—in 1994, no less—as delicate, baroque and eclectic as this.

But singer Keith Girdler did something groundbreaking here—something no other lyricist, to my knowledge, has done in the 25-plus years since Unisex was released. These songs—variously ambiguous and shockingly specific, heartbreaking and playful—tell stories about romantic and physical desire that were so ahead of their time, no one else seems to have yet caught up to them. If it were released now, Unisex might be hailed as the first album to present an authentic, thematically whole meditation about gender-fluid love and sex in the 21st century. In fact, Unisex is that, but it arrived five and a half years before the 21st century did.

All of that, and Unisex was recorded in a matter of days for virtually no money. How did Blueboy do it?

There’s a reason Unisex is, by far, the most coveted album in the Sarah catalogue. It’s scarce, yes; but it’s also a masterpiece.”

—Michael White, Vancouver, October 2019"

A Colourful Storm, 2019