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José Dueñas: Vocals, Acoustics
Pedro Navarrete: Drums
Marc Serrano: Guitar
Victor Escareño: Bass

This is the story of a band that beat the odds.

A band that blasted out of Austin just one year ago on the force of its debut album … and ran face-first into a wall.

Out on the road, they read the mixed reviews. They watched as sales fell short of expectations. They wondered, when their label cut the tour short and summoned them back to do another album ASAP, whether they could pull it off in the few weeks they were allowed … and then their guitar player quit, even as the clock was starting to tick.

That's all history now. In the end, what we're left with is the story of a band that got a second chance and made it work.

This is the story of Ünloco, a band reborn and triumphant on Becoming I.

For Ünloco lead singer Joey Duenas, 2001 was probably the worst year of his life. He was depressed. His romantic life was unraveling. His voice, ordinarily terrifying in its power and intensity onstage, was falling apart beneath clouds of cigarette smoke and a stream of Jack Daniels.

Most distressing was the letdown that followed the release that year of Healing, the band's first album. Dark and aggressive, it captured much of the intensity that had established Ünloco as hometown favorites among Austin's heavy music community. Even so, Healing wasn’t the smash that the band – and the label – had anticipated. A tour was set up in hopes that Ünloco’s explosive live shows would build the album’s momentum. But as they were preparing for the road, another crisis erupted when Bryan Arthur suddenly left the group to take over the guitarist gig with Goldfinger.

Moving quickly to fill the vacancy, the band connected with Marc Serrano, a young veteran of the Dallas music scene who was having second thoughts about the band he was working with at the time. The three members of Ünloco drove north to hear Serrano at a local gig. They were not disappointed. In fact, they invited him then and there to hang with them for a week in Austin, rehearse a bit, and see how things felt. "I stayed at Joey's house, and he showed me some new songs he had written," Serrano says. "We played through it all with the band. I showed them what I could do by adding my style to the new stuff. Pretty soon we were jamming as a band. I guess they were impressed, because at the end of the week it was like, 'You want in?'"

The combination clicked immediately. "I feed off all the guys when we're playing," says drummer Peter Navarrette. "I kick the crap out of my drums, but they make me want to hit 'em even harder. And Marc drives me more than any of the other guitarists we've had." “Marc gets a great sound out of the guitar, even from the beginning,” adds bassist Victor Escarena, “and he is such a great player. We're lucky to have him in our band."

Right after his arrival, Marc and his new bandmates took off on tour. Slugging it out on stages for more than eight months, they deepened their sound and heightened their energy night after night. For this reason, when they received word from Maverick that they had to head back home to crank out a new album, they were more musically ready to be tested than they'd ever been. Still, it was no easy thing to be told, in effect, that this album would be their do-or-die project.

They all knew what was on the line as they gathered back in Austin. From September through November last year they wrote new material -- 14 songs in September alone. These were demoed in November and December, then delivered personally by Duenas to Maverick in L.A. "I was like, 'Here, take this. I'm sick of it all.' The next day they were like, 'When can we get you into the studio?' They were just on it," the singer says, snapping his fingers.

Over a two-month period Ünloco began and finished Becoming i. Pressure was a part of the process. "There was so much going on," Duenas says. "We were having internal band issues. We were exhausted from the tour we'd just done. We were all having relationship problems. But we did everything right this time. Our writing was stronger. Lyrically, I was able to put my feelings across more simply than on the first album, without people having to go, 'What the hell are you talking about?'"

Purely in sonic terms, Becoming i is a revelation. Working closely with producer Mudrock (Godsmack, Powerman 5000, 3rd Strike), they examined their own assumptions about themselves and explored possibilities they hadn't considered before. "I remember sitting with Mudrock in Dallas one night," Duenas says. "We were talking about where I wanted to go with the sound on this record, and he said, 'Well, heavy is good, but who are you to judge your own band and say you can only be heavy? I think you have so many different sounds in you, and I want to bring them out.' That's what I love about Mudrock: He has great ears and great ideas, and he's a great friend."

Frustrated with their career, angry at not finding the sound they wanted, excited, inspired -- Ünloco hit the studios in a fury last March, and emerged bloodied, battered, and stronger than ever. From the broad impact of Becoming i down to the details, they've captured the full power of their music. With time allotted for pre-production, they were able to wait until they'd nailed the essence of each song before recording. Somehow they could solve the tiniest problems -- Navarrette, for example, used ten different snare drums, carefully seeking the best one for every title -- while still tracking with much the same speed they'd shown on Healing.

“I ended up finishing the drum tracks for thirteen songs in two and a half days,” Navarrette marvels. “It was like working in a pressure cooker to capture everything in a way that it would all hit, but we put our head together and managed to come up with some great results.”

Then there are the songs themselves. More focused, more accessible, harder hitting, and softened at times by moments of unexpected reflection, Becoming i fulfills the band's promise of poetic candor and riveting performance. There are songs so personal that Duenas had to be persuaded to present them in public ("Texas"), songs that speak to the growing legions of fans who see in Ünloco a mirror of their own fears and hopes ("Empty"), and songs that are without exception honest, no matter what the cost of honesty might be. 2/03