Unwound

In a career spanning roughly a decade, Unwound were among those who defined the traits of the noise-rock that raged through the underground of the Nineties. Along with other bands with whom they shared labels and recording studios, they also helped solidify a robust alternative scene in the American Pacific Northwest. With this, their seventh and final album, they finally greeted the new decade with their boldest and most ambitious work.

Like other guitar bands who spent the last decade of the last century wielding noise and melody, Unwound followed in the footsteps of the classic English post-punk acts of ten to fifteen years earlier, amplifying their firepower and shaping their approach on the template of the noisiest, most cathartic Nineties college rock. In 1998 Unwound (Justin Trosper on vocals and guitar, Vern Rumsey on bass, and Sarah Lund on drums) released "Challenge for a Civilized Society," a record that alienated some longtime fans with its mix of jittery, aggressive tracks and stretches inspired by post-rock and psychedelia. Once again, the orthodoxy of a segment of the indie faithful gets in the way of a band's evolution and stylistic maturation, whenever it fails to align with the obtuse dogma of less is more.

Having reached this point, the trio could only push further: in April 2001 came "Leaves Turn Inside You," a double album that welcomed the new decade with a collection of songs that scaled heights American independent rock of the Nineties had never before reached. Once again it's the mature record that contains the biggest shifts in an indie band's formula, contradicting the romantic yet never-proven theory that a rock band can only innovate during its early work. "Leaves Turn Inside You," in fact, is neither an iconoclastic nor a revolutionary record. What novelty it does contain is, if anything, the result of meticulous attention to detail, the maturing of three musicians and songwriters, and precisely that kind of mannerism typically found in a grown-up band.

Listening to its tight rhythms, filtered vocals, more cryptic-than-ever lyrics and its anti-riffs, one can't help but find a mutated version of the style typical of that cerebral, abstract indie rock which, nurturing the seeds planted by bands like Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth, Wire, Gang of Four and Big Black, forged its own language over the course of the Nineties, made of pauses and accelerations, odd time signatures, unusual tunings, cathartic explosions and cerebral, enigmatic lyrics. It is precisely with this album that the genre finds its finest, most refined form. Often compared to Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation" for its status as a double album and noise-rock classic, "LTIY" closes out an era of independent rock that, for reasons having nothing to do with the album's influence (it certainly wasn't a bestseller), would soon change shape, gradually shedding distortion and amplifiers and embracing, with less wariness, more classic and pop-leaning influences. It's no coincidence that in 2001 another pivotal band of the post-hardcore era, Fugazi, released their most inventive and wide-ranging album. And, once again, it's no coincidence that both bands broke up shortly after, scattering into a myriad of side projects and collaborations of varying significance. It's hard, after all, to push beyond the boundaries drawn by the expressive language of "Leaves Turn Inside You" while staying confined to the same genre.

The tracklist ends each of the two discs (titled “2” and “3” respectively) with two songs that brush up against or exceed the ten-minute mark. But it's not just their suite-like length that evokes progressive rock. The whole album is built on the typical scaffolding of Eighties-Nineties alternative rock, but the arrangements and instrumental embellishments that make up its sonic fabric are often played on mellotron. The keyboard heard on dozens of songs that made psychedelic and prog history crops up again and again, simulating orchestral scores and filling in the gaps left by the guitar and bass harmonies. It's not the first time a noise-rock band has armed itself with vintage keyboards (think of Brainiac and their howling synth solos), but no band in the scene had ever used them so thoroughly and pervasively before.

Recorded mostly in 2000, “Leaves Turn Inside You” is in fact an album that makes the recording studio its greatest virtue. After years spent working with producer Steve Fisk, the band decided to set up their own studio and work on the expanding palette of colors already glimpsed on their previous two albums. This time indie producer Phil Ek would lend a hand. If quality songwriting was never in short supply in their discography, this time it's the production that takes the leap forward, with an unprecedented array of effects and harmony work only possible in a recording-studio setting (the album would be performed live with the classic power-trio lineup).

The album opens provocatively, with a high-pitched, piercing drone that fades after a couple of minutes into a spacey ballad with the enigmatic title “We Invent You”. The cathartic scream is no longer Trosper's preferred modus operandi. His voice, rendered unrecognizable by reverb, sounds instead like a drowsy summons (“Collect your belongings / Follow me in reverse”). What immediately stands out is the dreamlike orchestration looming over the guitar lines, reduced to a few bare-bones chords.

In the gothic nursery rhyme “Look A Ghost”, memories of a person (deceased?) blend with the claustrophobic interiors of a nightmarish house: “You knew her from before/ she hid behind the door/ You never noticed that/ the hallways turned to black/ The stairway is a chance/ to fall and break your hands/ She just might push you down/ so never turn around”. The arrangement, as spare as it is dramatic, features constant breaks from the rhythm section (never this expressive before), swirls of arpeggiated guitars, and disorienting tremolo effects.

The range of styles includes formats the trio had never tried before. While the achingly slow piano-and-echo-drenched guitar progression of the post-rock behemoth “Below The Salt” (nearly eleven minutes of unrelenting tension with no release) is something you might expect from a North American indie-rock outfit, the psychedelic lullaby “Demons Sing Love Songs” charts entirely uncharted territory. Sweetened by backing vocals from Sleater-Kinney's Janet Weiss and the naive tones of its chorus, it hovers between the lightness of a Sixties pop song – the melody line doubled by a harpsichord – and the chill stirred up by veiled references to suicide. The American alternative-rock movement, which with grunge had explicitly embodied Generation X's depression, comes of age here. There's no room for the liberating howl of a Billy Corgan exorcising his depression by snarling “Love is suicide”. The same feeling of alienation and disorientation is disguised by the symbolism of Trosper's abstract, deconstructed lyrics, as he sings here “I’m the monster standing by your heart/ A life-size figure ashamed to be alive”; “Sometimes I think I’m stranded in hotels/ Hanging from the highest tree in town”. He grows ever more resigned on the single “Scarlette”: “Cross my heart and hope to die/ Don’t recall the reason why”.

The same taste for the naive resurfaces in the nonsense rhymes of “Terminus”, the first long track on the record, this time closer to a multi-part progressive suite in the vein of “Valentine Card…” from their debut “Fake Train”. The first movement stays on more rock-oriented tracks, with chord geometries and chained-together riffs backed by a martial drumbeat – post-hardcore fans will hear echoes of “If It Kills You” by Drive Like Jehu. Between the third and fourth minute, the band launches into a melodic figure passed between multiple instruments: first a distorted guitar alongside one run through a wah pedal, then droplets of electric piano, then a cello, and so on. The loop continues as the electric instruments gradually drop away, leaving space for the strings alone. Just enough time for a brief chamber-music interlude before the rhythm section kicks back in with a melancholy groove, dominated by the sound of a vibrato-heavy Fender Rhodes.

They must have listened to a lot of post-rock back then: on “October All Over” the main melodic line is played on a clean guitar à la Slint, yet the effect isn't one of catalepsy, since the rhythm section breaks out into an unexpectedly bouncy funk. A backdrop of reversed guitar yowls and the usual mellotron accompaniment smooth out the edges and lend a sense of liquefaction.

“One Lick Less”, which opens the second disc, embodies the aesthetic of “LTIY” more than any other song. The harmonic structure is almost rudimentary, while the arrangement consists of a continuous pile-up of electric howls, evanescent chords, and thoroughly listless, sleepwalking backing vocals. The harmonies wink fairly explicitly at shoegaze, with guitars almost entirely stripped of attack, creating whirlpools of reversed echo not unlike the ones Kevin Shields conjures on “Loveless“. But if shoegaze immortalizes the moment of peak ecstasy and loss of control preached by early-Nineties rave culture, the slow, solemn gothic dirge of “One Lick Less” seems to capture the subsequent descent into a heavy, leaden sleep. It would take until the late 2000s for these sounds and suggestions to bloom again in indie-rock: don't the explosions at the end of “Off This Century” foreshadow the blend of kraut-rock, jingle-jangle and shoegaze later found in Deerhunter?

As already mentioned, the album keeps the post-punk roots on which the Olympia, WA band built its career, but cunningly conceals them beneath a thick blanket of backing vocals and effects. The single “Scarlette” unfolds over an extremely rough-edged bassline (Unwound doing Big Black doing Gang of Four), a hail of hammering, heavily filtered chords. Nothing new for Unwound, but the ideas are fully reimagined in light of the new sound. The lyrics deserve a mention too, seemingly seething with rage over the end of a relationship, quite possibly the least cryptic on the record. The Unwound-style paradigm can also be traced in the stuttering chorus of “Treachery” and the hypnotic groove of “Summer Freeze”, even if it's clouded over – by the synth-expanded instrumentation of the former, and by the zombie-like vocal harmonies of the latter.

Where most of the leading Nineties noise-rock acts like Polvo and Shellac arrived at the year 2000 running on fumes (assuming they got there at all), releasing records that grew ever more cerebral and self-referential, Unwound saved their masterpiece for the very start of the following decade. As mentioned, “Leaves Turn Inside You” is a culmination, more than a turning point. It's an important record precisely because it raises the bar for quality within the genre, striking the perfect balance of feeling and swagger, brain and brawn. Embracing post-rock elements as well, “LTIY” stands as an uncomfortable benchmark within the genre, which indeed, after this double album and the one released the year before by Canada's Godspeed You! Black Emperor, would dwindle into a diaspora of clone bands mired in the same structures and enslaved to the same clichés.

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26/02/2017