Good news, then. Teenbeat is reissuing the album in all of its boxed-set glory, with six 7-inches plus a handful of bonus tracks (that weren't on the 1993 CD or LP versions) sprinkled among them. It has a 24-page booklet with pictures from the album's sessions, a package printed with metallic gold ink, and, if you spend a little extra, three Unrest live recordings. ("England, 1992," "Newcastle, 1993," and "Washington, DC, 2005.") There are also options for pins and mugs and things. You can pre-order now; the thing ships in April.

And maybe one day I will finally write that treatise on the semiotics of manic guitar jangles and even more manic drum fills.

The tracklist, plus a video explaining everything, after the jump.

Perfect Teeth

Teen-Beat 70
Isabel (side A)
Love To Know (B1)
Wharton Hockey Club (B2)

Teen-Beat 91
West Coast Love Affair (C)
Soon It Is Going To Rain (D)

Teen-Beat 105
Cath Carroll (E)
So So Sick (F1)
Capezio Bowler (F2)

Teen-Beat 112
Angel I'll Walk You Home (G)
Breather X.X.X. (H1)
Stylized Ampersand (H2)

Teen-Beat 126
Make Out Club (I)
Food & Drink Synthesizer (J1)
Plastic Film (J2)

Teen-Beat 133
Light Command (K)
Six Layer Cake (L)

UNREST Perfect Teeth / 7" Box Set from Teen-Beat on Vimeo.

Indie rock was still super-weird at that point (relative to everything else), but mainstream college journalists generally covered it straight-up, because nobody quite knew what they were looking at, even though they sensed that it was possibly important. In many cases, it was easiest just to say or write something along the lines of: Here's the thing, here's the people who make it, and here's their rationale. Why not be earnest, y'know? The alt-world was uncomplicated, but it wouldn't stay that way for long.

(Teenbeat has re-released Sexual Milkshake's Sing-A-Long In Hebrew as a deluxe CD.)

TeenBeat Records had its big reunion do at the Black Cat on Saturday. (Before the show, BYT interviewed the label’s founder, Mark Robinson, Deborah Solomon-style.) Aaron Leitko was at the gig, as was J.L. Fischer, and pretty much every other D.C. music geek. The verdict? Leitko’s review for WaPo was tepid. Fischer said it was dece, but Unrest should have played “Skinhead Girl.” Dan Kois called the scene “pleasantly bananas.” Consensus: Nostalgia counts for something.

Speaking of music geeks, they have 14 new reasons to love Pitchfork. By 14 new reasons, I mean a collective of 14 new music blogs feeding content to a new sister site dedicated to obscure DIY stuff.

She and Him played the 9:30 Club on Friday after releasing a new music video earlier that day. I didn’t go the show; Zooey Deschanel and I are in a fight on account of she married Ben Gibbard instead of eloping with me to Paris, where we would listen to old records, run fast and loose with iconclastic ex-pats, and live in a kooky yet tasteful apartment at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Speaking of the 9:30, the Tallest Man on Earth just added a date there for the fall. TMOE has moved up the rungs of the venue ladder each time he’s been through town, and for good reason. Mark Oct. 3 on your calendars.

Do you like Bonnie Prince Billy? If so, you might consider donating to the recovery of Phosphorescent’s stolen gear, ’cause Matthew Houck has got plenty of BPB-grade material trapped in him.

A final bit of TeenBeat nostalgia—Unrest, ca. 1993—to play me out:

Teenbeat Records has been based in Cambridge, Mass., for some time, but the Arlington-formed label is essential to D.C. musical DNA. Over the past 26 years, the label has documented a rich supply of scrappy, lo-fi pop. It's a large body of work, but like any good label, Teenbeat numbers its releases obsessively—it also also numbers to things like interns, T-shirts, and annual reports. Arts Desk asked a handful of TB artists to curate and discuss their favorite work before the Teenbeat anniversary show at the Black Cat this Saturday.

No. 7: Unrest – "Unrest" seven-inch
Regarding the influential band's debut seven-inch, founding member Tim Moran ('83 – '86) says: "In hindsight, a lot of the stuff Mark [Robinson] rereleased later on I liked more, but it's hard to compare with the excitement of a first release. A lot was done in one take—three maximum." Moran recalls a tour mishap that occured not too long after the record's release. "We were going to play Chicago and Louisville on a break from school, and we were driving in Mark's old Cadillac. On the way up, the exhaust pipe started falling off, dragging on the ground and making sparks. We had to stop a couple times and tie it up with some wire. We made it to Chicago, but after that the car was shot. We tried to make it to Louisville but had to give up."

Mark Robinson, label founder and the driving force behind Unrest, started Teenbeat in high school as a lending library to share the experimental noise his band was working on with his friends. He's filled many roles—curator, musician, songwriter, producer, graphic designer—and says choosing a favorite song is nearly impossible. "I can't really say," quips Robinson. "'Cherry Cherry' and 'Malcolm X Park' are really enjoyable because of their simple, repeated lyrics." When pressed, he eventually admits it's hard to beat the excitement of going into the studio for the first time to record the "Unrest" single. "We went to a place called Zoodio Studio in Woodley Park. It's a large Victorian house apartment looking out onto the National Zoo. It was essentially an electronic music new-age studio. The engineer had never recorded drums or amps. He suggested we plug the guitars directly in instead of using amps. We recorded eight or nine songs in like six hours. He was a strange guy, but we actually came out with good mixes."

No. 109: Jonny Cohen's Love Machine – Getting Our Heads Together
Musical jokester Jonny Cohen hooked up with Teenbeat in the late '80s not long after asking Unrest to cover his song "I'm Not An Anorexic." On releasing his first album with TB, Cohen says: "We recorded in Ambient Studios with Ray Tilkens in College Park, which was basically in his house. I remember I told Ray I wanted to be successful and stick to my vision. He thought that was funny and said, 'Good luck.'"

No. 142: Versus – The Stars Are Insane
Though Versus moved on to work with other labels, the NYC band got its start with Teenbeat and never fully left. Continuing the trend, drummer Ed Baluyut still prefers his first TB release over the others. "I think everyone in the band acknowledges that there's an urgency to that material that exceeds some of the other albums," he says. "Richard [Baluyut] says he has some trouble listening to it because the vocals aren't perfect, but that adds a certain charm to it." Ed Baluyut also recalled an annual Teenbeat tradition: "They would throw a banquet at a hilarious back room of a Chinese restaurant in Arlington. Mark [Robinson] would have people come up and do variety acts. There were speeches and food, and everyone wins some award."

No. 231: Unrest – Malcom X Park
Remembering a particularly notable TB recording session, bassist Dave Park of Unrest ('88 – '89) and Eggs says: "We recorded at Noise New York with Kramer—the original guy from New York City—at the same studio as Butthole Surfers' Rembrandt Pussyhorse... I think Moe Tucker recorded about a month before we were in there. Kramer was one of those guys that would throw an instrument in your hand—he'd say, 'Here, play harmonica on that song,' and I didn't play harmonica." Touring on that same LP, the band didn't get a lot of rest. "Mark [Robinson] might kick my ass for sharing this, but on one of our minitours, we stayed at his grandmother's house in New Jersey," Park says. "We came in late, went to sleep, and it seemed like only two or three hours later when Mark woke us up and said, 'We gotta go.' I just remember piling all our stuff on the van and going, 'I don't understand why we're doing this.'" Robinson explains: "My grandmother was sort of imagining things and kept saying, 'I don't like all the loud noise you're making.' She was convinced we had been performing and it was time for us to leave."

No. 407: Bossanova – Hey, Sugar
Songwriter Chris Storrow of Bossanova had worked with the label for years before completing his full-length. "It was recorded between 1998 and 2004, he says. "I couldn't really get accomplished what I wanted in a real recording studio, so I had to spend a few years putting together a studio of my own." Of course, when he wasn't in the studio, Storrow was still keeping busy. "I had a really great time with Mark [Robinson]," he says. "In 2001, he recruited me to be his backup guitar player for a tour down the west coast. It was me, him, and Calvin Johnson from K Records in the car for a week. It was cool for me having grown up being fans of those guys."

No. 428: The Rondelles – In Your Face
Drummer and keyboardist Oakley Munson of the Rondelles says his bestwork might predate the band's signing to the label. "My favorite thing is actually the original four-track tapes, the original demos we sent to Mark [Robinson]—to me, that sounds like the most interesting stuff we did," he says. "Of course, it didn't come out until six months ago." The songs found their way onto later records, but Munson prefers to listen to the demos "in the early stages, before we could play our instruments."

The Teenbeat 26th Anniversary Show takes place at Black Cat tomorrow. It features three Unrest line-ups, the Rondelles, Versus, and Bossanova, along with emcees Jonny Cohen and Patrick Bryant. Image courtesy Unrest's MySpace page.

David Quammen's patrons aren't, though, and that's the problem: The subject of my colleague Amanda Hess' column this week runs the MOCA DC gallery in Georgetown and is facing eviction—partially because a performer, from one of his regular events involving nude models, wandered into the courtyard the gallery shares with some other businesses. The amateur performer was wearing tassels, and nothing else. But Quammen thinks his landlords are merely being prude: “For being a liberal city, there’s a lot of conservatism here,” he tells Hess.

* The Boston Globe profiles Teenbeat Records' Mark Robinson, who helped form the label in Arlington in the '80s and still runs it from his home in Cambridge, Mass. His classic indie-pop band Unrest is stopping by the Black Cat next Saturday with other Teenbeat acts on the occasion of the label's 26th year. It could lead to something more:

Up until earlier this week, each band member had been rehearsing separately ([Bridget] Cross lives in Alaska and [Phil] Krauth is in Virginia); for Robinson, that meant relearning the songs by playing along with the recordings. He doesn’t know if the tour will spawn a new album, but he’s open to the idea.

* WaPo's Dan Zak profiles George Austin Hay, who at age 94 just retired from the Department of Transportion after working for the federal government for 55 years, and whose acting career is even longer. He's worked on Broadway and in Hollywood, brushed shoulders with Marilyn Monroe and Alfred Hitchcock, and had bit parts in movies like North by Northwest and Being There. (In the latter, he's the pallbearer who asks, "What about Chauncey Gardiner?")

* WaPo's Jessica Dawson isn't blown away by artist and City Paper critic Jeffry Cudlin's new show, "By Request." The subject? The Washington art scene:

And so "By Request" is a grand insider joke — easy for me to understand because I know these people. Those who don't know them will undoubtedly feel left out. Indeed, a show this insular has a very slim chance of going down in history (the Dada antics chronicled in art history texts) and might end up registering as less than a footnote.

* Another popular dance night moves to U Street Music Hall.

* Sockets Records has shots from Wednesday's Buildings Guitar Orchestra concert at DC9.

* Story-driven local indie rockers the Caribbean are keeping a tour diary for the Vinyl District.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The show hits the Black Cat on July 10. Versus, the Rondelles (in its original lineup), and Bossanova are also playing.

Debate still rages over proper style for the label's name. The website uses Teen-Beat. Andrew Beaujon—departing City Paper managing editor, leader of the label's Eggs—prefers Teenbeat. "I violently oppose the hyphen," he says.

"The Orange Line Revolution," Aaron Leitko's December 2009 story about punk houses in Arlington, has been selected for inclusion in Best Music Writing 2010. The piece takes a look at Kansas House, as well as some group homes associated with local indie labels and movements, such as Dischord, Simple Machines, and Positive Force. As Leitko writes in the introduction, the story is a "look back at when Arlington was punk." I edited the story, and I'm an extremely minor character in it. But that's not why I'm proud of it–I'm happy that such a good writer is getting recognized for such a good piece. Congrats, Aaron.

DIY record labels like Teenbeat, Dischord, and Simple Machines, as well as activist groups like Positive Force, cleverly repurposed Arlington’s middle-class workforce housing, then available as cheap, safe rentals, into small businesses, design studios, and rehearsal rooms.

Now that Kansas House is kaput, that time is effectively over. Those houses have been repurposed again, this time by developers who have built condominiums, restaurants, and shopping centers.

Leitko visits each of those houses, and talks to some of the key figures who lived in them. Read the full feature here.

Over the last 15 years, Kansas House, a tiny four-bedroom home in Arlington, has seen members of bands that recorded for almost every D.C. record label—Dischord, Teenbeat, Slowdime, Simple Machines—crash on its floors, perform in its living room, or be thoroughly revolted by its rat-infested basement.

Kansas House is not a club. Shows happen there once or twice a month. But the experience of seeing a show at Kansas House is different. At the Black Cat, for instance, you buy a ticket and see a band. But anyone who's crammed into Kansas House's tiny living room to watch Black Eyes, Q and Not U, or Trans Am could be forgiven for feeling  like they were part of a movement.

You can still feel that way, at least for a few more months. On Dec. 1, Kansas House's epic run will finally come to an end. The building is in the process of being sold to an Arlington development firm. Eventually, the house will be demolished to make way for mixed-use development.

Really, though, it's a miracle  Kansas House lasted this long. Whether because of angry neighbors, freaked-out landlords, or the complicated lives of their residents, punk houses tend to have a short shelf life. Kansas House, however, has been blessed with a particularly favorable set of circumstances–easy Metro access, relative isolation from other houses, and a landlord who was, to say the least, not very nosy.

Throughout the ’80s the Kansas House property was occupied by a thrift store. Ian MacKaye, then living at the nearby Dischord house, shopped there from time to time. “That was my secret Christmas spot,” he says. Among his purchases: a 100 percent accurately sculpted rubber cabbage.

In the mid-'90s, Margarita Metaxatos acquired the property and started renting it as a residence. This was during the heyday of Arlington’s indie-rock renaissance—when labels like Teenbeat, Dischord, Slowdime, and Simple Machines were in full stride. It didn’t take long for enterprising rockers to see the property’s potential.

Derek Morton, then playing in Ex-Atari Kid, was among the first musicians to move in. “It was between ’96 and ’97,” he recalls. “When we moved in it was a bunch of college kids. We were probably the first band.”

At the time, Morton didn’t use the house to host performances. Instead he and his housemates used it as a practice space and a home base for his fledgling record label, Rocker! Supernova. “It wasn’t a band house in the sense that bands played every weekend,” he says. The house frequently put up bands that were on their way through town and needed a place to crash. Word got around. “I remember getting this phone call from Gerard Cosloy [co-owner of Matador Records], he was looking for a place for one of his bands to crash,” says Morton. “But I had never given him my number, I have no idea how he got it.”

As with any group house, roommates flowed in and out pretty casually, but there were a few staples that stuck around. Bob Massey, of the groups Telegraph Melts and Gena Rowlands Band, put in five years, living at Kansas House from ’96-’01.

“We consistently had shows there for that whole five year period,” recalls Massey, who now lives in Los Angeles. “We started out us just throwing shows for our friend’s bands. Then people started calling—Most Secret Method, Dismemberment Plan, they came along pretty soon.”

The list of bands that performed at Kansas House during that first five or six years is a who's-who of post-punk and indie-rock. The Faint played there. So did the Rapture, Japanther, and Golden.

“I was at a Locust show at the house; I might have even set it up” says Frodus drummer Jason Hamacher, who lived in at Kansas House during the fall of ’00. “It was totally nuts. I had a fur collar that I had bought in West Virginia and a sword. At one point I was shirtless with a collar and a sword running around the living room.”

“There was another show–that band Sloar Floor, from Florida. It wasn’t packed. I took my friend Nate to the show and they were just so heavy. Every person in the band played with a full stack, in that tiny room. Nate said he felt semi-nauseous."

Despite the noise, run-ins with the cops were few. For years the house's only neighbors were a halal meat market and a gas station. Across the street was another house (since demolished) occupied by members of the ska band the Pietasters. Nausea-inducing heavy rock from Florida was not an issue.

Kansas House lacked in the accouterments of a professional concert venue. There was no backstage. There was no stage! Hell, there was only one bathroom. Bands that played there often had to supply their own PAs and usually their own refreshments. What Kansas House did offer was flexibility. It was the perfect place to hold off-beat events that would have wilted in a bar or club environment.

In the early '00s Massey ran a series of performances called “Punk Not Rock,” which asked local musicians to develop site-specific musical compositions to perform at the space. “Some people were straight up, others really imaginative,” remembers MacKaye, who attended several of the performances. “Vin Novara did a performance on bowls with varying amounts of water. There was another guy who came in and claimed to be a classical whistler.” A few people got a little more ambitious. “Alberto Gaitán, he had some music going on in the living room, but it was synced to a car with one of those pimped-out stereo systems," recalls Massey. "It was thudding in time while the car was outside going around the block.”

There were non-musical happenings as well. “Hugh McElroy [bassist/singer of Black Eyes], had these kids from Rhode Island, they had this thing called a party tour," says Jason Barnett, who lived in the house from '01-'08. "They were going to different cities and bringing a party with them. We bought a keg and they brought big balls, blow-up animals, and different costumes. And they cleaned up afterward—that was the best part."

At this point the house has been in action for so long that Collin Crowe, one of the currant tenants, can recall going to shows there when he was a teenager. "I was like 17 or 18. Nate from Frodus had this solo thing that played [Out-circuit]," says Crowe. "It’s totally weird that I live here now. It used to be this cool mysterious awesome house for me. If I was 17 and talking to my past self, he would be like 'That's awesome.' But really, it’s kind of whatever."

Fifteen years of band practices, animal-costume parties, keggers, and hardcore shows has taken its toll on the property. If the wrecking ball weren't on the way, Kansas House might just implode from exhaustion. "It's an old house," says Barnett. "If you went into the basement during a show, you could see the floorboards moving." Not to mention that the area itself has changed into a sprawling yuppie paradise. "Dudes who would be bar-hopping from Ballston and Clarendon, would crash in" during shows, says Barnett, "Yuppie-type dudes who would come over for the keg." At this point, Kansas House has become a bit of a stranger in a strange land.

"It sucks that houses like this vanish, bands can’t practice," says Crowe, who hopes to start another punk house in the District, noting another one in Northeast that's "insane. There’s a schoolbus in the yard, a couple people live there. All bike co-oppy."

"I’m sure this is tragic, says MacKaye. "But it’s not the building that's important, it's always the people."

Teenbeat has announced that, for the first time since ’92, the label has re-pressed Unrest's Imperial f.f.r.r. as a vinyl LP. It's a nice gesture for those of us who missed it the first time (myself included). There are a few critics out there who imply that Imperial f.f.r.r. was the band's breakthrough—the moment when scrappy and high-concept indie-rock gave way to blissful minimalist pop. I might be inclined to agree. Then again, I refuse to spend any serious time with the follow up, Perfect Teeth, until I can afford listen to it in the way it was meant to be heard.

What's more, the Teenbeat Website has made two Unrest live CDs available via mail order—one set recorded in 1993 and another from the label's 20th anniversary show in 2005.

Track listings for the live stuff after the jump.

NEWCASTLE, AUGUST 2, 1993

1: Imperial
2: Cath Carroll
3: I Do Believe You Are Blushing
4: So Sick
5: Bavarian Mods
6: Six Layer Cake
7: Suki
8: Isabel
9: Make Out Club
10:June
11: Canadian Broadcasting Interview

WASHINGTON, Feb 24, 2005
1: Blushing (soundcheck)
2: Don Smith intro I
3: Don Smith intro II
4: Suki
5: Imperial
6: I Do Believe You Are Blushing
7: Sugarshack
8: Isabel
9: Light Command
10: West Coast Love Affair
11: Make Out Club
12: Vibe Out! / Hudro
13: Cath Carroll
14: June
15: Cherry Cherry