By the late '90s, Unwound were asking themselves whether the band was worth fighting for. The trio had invested more time and money into their 1998 album Challenge for a Civilized Society than they had any other, and they’d never been more disappointed by the returns. Trading the unrelenting roar of its predecessors for hit-or-miss studio experimentation, the album alienated longtime fans and halted any career momentum the group had gained from their 1996 near-breakthrough Repetition. "I remember playing Challenge for a couple of friends in Olympia after we finished it, and them just kinda starting at the ground," drummer Sara Lund recounts in the liner notes for Empire, the final of four box sets exhaustively chronicling the band’s career. "It’s my least favorite of our records," says bassist Vern Rumsey.
If Unwound had split up after Challenge—and they came close—the band would have ended on an off note, but their legacy would have been secure. The trio had so perfectly refined their chaotic noise rock over their first five albums that they’d forever be remembered; while they’d never be celebrated as widely as Nirvana or Fugazi, their DNA would live on for generations as young punk bands discovered and learned from them. Instead of disbanding, though, they pushed on a little longer, holding out against mounting personal troubles and growing geographic and emotional separation long enough to muster a magnificent final statement, 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, a hauntingly beautiful double album that upended every preconceived notion about the band.
Leaves Turn Inside You, out of print on vinyl for over a decade, is Empire’s main event, the career high this entire box set series has been leading up to. But despite its low standing in the band’s discography, Challenge for a Civilized Society is worth revisiting, too. It’s Unwound’s End Hits, a transitional work from a band chaining themselves to the studio in hopes of forcing inspiration, and occasionally succeeding. Even though they don’t cohere, the songs reveal a range the band’s previous albums had never hinted at. The opening throes of the nine-minute "Side Effects of Being Tired" are scribbled with gnarly free-jazz saxophone. The techno diss "NO TECH!" pillages the wiry rhythms of post-punk acts like Swell Maps and the Pop Group, while the boozy, blustery guitar licks of "Meet the Plastics" imagine what an Unwound Jon Spencer Blues Explosion covers album might have sounded like.
On an album of curiosities, one stands out as a clear success: "Lifetime Achievement Award", a ghostly dirge composed over a found recording of "Happy Birthday" played backward. Hypnotically paced and chillingly sad, it’s the one moment on Challenge where everything comes together: the performance, the songwriting, the phantasmal production, the overall feel; everything about it feels piped in from a different record. Three years later, they’d actually release that record. Leaves Turn Inside You took all the right lessons away from its predecessor’s hits and misses. This time the band wasn’t tossing spaghetti at the wall. They had focus.
Though Challenge’s sales were lackluster, a publishing deal with BMG afforded the band enough money to get started on a project they’d long dismissed as a pipe dream: building their own studio. They assembled it piece by piece in the basement of an old farmhouse, borrowing equipment they couldn’t afford from Calvin Johnson and teaching themselves how to use it. The band had never self-produced an album before, but the challenge invigorated Rumsey and singer/guitarist Justin Trosper, who spent weeks obsessing over technical details, figuring out the best ways to capture interesting sounds and texture. Traditionally the band has worked fast and shrugged off mistakes. Now they were discovering the luxury of time.
Midway through their sessions, the band’s old producer Steve Fisk visited their farmhouse to check their progress. “I thought, ‘God, what a terrible, depressing, sad place to be putting a record together,’” he recalls in Empire’s liner notes. That house casts a long shadow over Leaves. On "Below the Salt", a fractured, 11-minute lament paced like a séance, you can almost hear the foundation settling between notes. The similarly sprawling "Terminus" begins as a statement of defiance before succumbing mid-song to an orchestra of despair, led by a spectral cello that seems to sweep in and out of the studio walls. The whole record exists in a permanent November, condemned to those waning days of fall when all the color has been drained from the skyline, and all that’s left are barren trees and an isolating chill.
Yet for all its melancholy, Leaves is also an album of uncanny splendor. Opener "We Invent You" follows a full two minutes of cautionary drone—the band’s way, perhaps, of weeding out old-guard fans unwilling to take the album on its own terms—with an outpouring of mammoth, multi-tracked psychedelia. Trosper had recently discovered Led Zeppelin III; this was his homage. Friend of the band Janet Weiss, a few years away from letting her own classic-rock flag fly on Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, lent backing vocals to the closest thing Leaves offered to a pop song, "Demons Sing Love Songs", a gorgeous respite from the album’s prevailing unease.
Leaves Turn Inside You didn’t happen in a vacuum. Around the turn of the century, indie acts as varied as Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Wilco, and Modest Mouse were also embracing the studio, pouring considerable time into risky albums that ultimately proved high watermarks. But where those bands carried on with those victories under the belts, Unwound didn’t stick around to bask in their achievement.
There’s a generous way of contextualizing the group’s breakup: They put everything they had into one last, great album and called it a day. But the reality isn’t quite so romantic. Instead, the band resumed their slow process of breaking down. A tense tour behind Leaves had been cut short during its key stretch by September 11, and Rumsey’s worsening alcoholism had made it impossible to carry on like nothing was wrong. They announced their split 10 months after the album’s release, with an unceremonious post on the Kill Rock Stars website. Fourteen years later, Leaves Turn Inside You has lost none of its wonder, but it feels like a broken promise. Though the members of Unwound have bounced around between new bands, nothing they’ve recorded since has approached that album’s creativity or ambition. They teased a world of new directions, but never followed up on them.
In Empire’s liner notes, Trosper comments that in hindsight he realized some of his free-association lyrics on Leaves were about the troubled state of the band. The group hadn’t been on solid footing for a while; the writing had probably been on the wall even before they started recording the album. Perhaps that’s part of why it’s such a powerful work. It’s a last gasp, an album about ghosts by a band that on some level understood they were becoming one.
