Unwound
Leaves Turn Inside You
(Kill Rock Stars, 2001)

I loved the title. Given, I’m biased because my favorite record is Sonic Youth’s A Thousand Leaves and Unwound was milking my sweet spot here by invoking an even more psychedelic autumnal image. Nevertheless, I listened to Leaves Turn Inside You because I liked the title, and the art didn’t hurt either: A stark midnight backdrop with the band name rendered ominously in Middle English-style text à la Beowulf. I took the compliment personally when someone I know called it “fucking metal.” While Sonic Youth’s masterful spelunking expedition had the politeness to finish up over the course of one 80-minute disc, Unwound’s holy tome messily splays across two because it’s fucking metal.

Unwound aren’t metal at all, actually. A post-hardcore noise unit from Olympia who struggled for years alongside, oh, Polvo, and countless other faceless (don’t wince, I didn’t see you picking Sara Lund out at 88 Boadrum last year) groups who struggled to put noises and tunes together in new ways without leaving their world. And granted, it’s hard to distinguish the earlier Repetition and The Future of What from Polvo or make out much of anything from the disconsolate if occasionally interesting dissonances. But on these 1999-2000 recordings released the following year as their swan song, the perennially discordant trio finally succeeded in keeping their sludgier tendencies at bay. The particle beam of feedback—which passkeys a whole two minutes of Leaves opener “We Invent You”—is an audacious start in many ways, not least for its Icelandic clarity. At the pace of a floe, with thundering guillotine drums and elegiac, off-in-the-distance vocals, the tune sets all kinds of bars too high for future standards of art rock, stoner rock, and prog; if there was any justice, some Strat-wielding jughead is transmogrifying it into the next Sunn O))) as we speak.

The flow of Leaves is nearly unsurpassed by any rock album of the last 10 years. Not only are there no dead spots, that crucial rarity for a slooow aural experience, but the way the tunes bleed into the next jam (or is it still part of the same song?) is without seam. The microwave-melt of production on the whole helps, from the strange synths that open the twisting “Treachery” to the galloping violins that race the middle movement of the nearly 10-minute “Terminus”, singing and lyrics are shoved to the back by blinking and swallowing instrumental textures that glide for 74 minutes without a resting place and only the occasional outburst. And even those barely stand up from the muck—never noticed the harsh grind of “Scarlette” until I sought out the video on YouTube, which collapses into psychedelic whirligigs soon enough, beneath someone’s (Justin Trosper? Sara Lund?) throatiest Kim Gordon impression. Even with all these well-implemented outside touches, there’s something refreshingly limited about the album’s production, something dry. It’s fun to imagine how its quiet release would’ve fared in the current indie landscape and, for that matter, how the tumbling “Off This Century” would’ve sounded if Death by Audio’s Oliver Ackermann had his fuzz-glazed way with it. But ultimately, it’s the warm combination of the epic and the caved-in that spices the record with mystery.

If the humans playing themselves are the light peeking in, well, there isn’t much. The lyrics are half-formed globules from storybooks about love demons, avenged poltergeists, “broken teeth for months it seems,” and mixed-up seasons—plenty for the stoned to ponder if they could make out these watery utterances through all the exquisite, rippling cybermud. Panda Bear should be so jealous. Whether it’s on the Gang of Four stutter-punch of “December”, the sexy, percolating “October All Over”, or the windy woodscape of “Look a Ghost”, Leaves Turn Inside You is virtually all one long, beautiful hymn that could use another preacher in its choir.

Watch: Music Video for “Scarlette” [at youtube.com]