What the fuck?: the one question any great album should elicit from you, involuntarily, like a musical doctor's mallet to your mind's knee. Ha, that's terrible! But, see, that's just it. A great album should have you grasping for horrible metaphors that come nowhere close to describing that ineffable whatever that makes good music so much more than just casual entertainment or pleasant background. Yes, the really good ones make you ask, "What the fuck?" with conviction. They extort feelings of reverence, awe, and respect from you.
No doubt, you've heard that saying about the Velvet Underground-- you know, the one that claims that, though next to no one actually heard their debut album when it came out, everyone who did went out and started a band of their own. I'd like to be able to say something similar about Unwound, but strangely enough, it's to their credit that I can't. They do have the obscurity thing in common, though I suspect that Unwound sells a hell of a lot more albums than the Velvet Underground did in the Factory days. Still, while anyone with a stringed instrument and opposable thumbs could have taken a respectable stab at emulating the Velvet Underground's brand of frenzied noise, the same cannot be said for Unwound.
Unwound is rock and roll, but only loosely speaking. It's often very aggressive with Justin Trosper belting out fractured lyrics like a napalmed banshee. But their music is so much more sophisticated, stranger and original than that of their contemporaries that it wouldn't be far from the truth to say they've written their own vocabulary and deployed a new syntax in this otherwise staid genre. Drawing inspiration from elements as disparate as Ornette Coleman's harmolodics, the compositions of Bela Bartók, rock and roll in general, and all points in between, Unwound have managed to rarely repeat themselves and never disappoint.
In many respects, Leaves Turn Inside You is the band's most ambitious, sweeping, and difficult outing yet. First, there's the sheer length (an hour and fourteen minutes), and then there's the format (two video-enhanced discs). Yet, for its epic length, there are only fourteen songs on this album, which means there's some really, really long tracks here. And not only long, but epic in the "Kashmir" sense. And within those songs, there's enough going on to keep even the most attention deficit disordered among us intrigued.
Take "Terminus," for instance, which consists of three distinct segments. The first is a 3\xBD minute-long, maraca-laced, frenetically percussive song unto itself, rife with great rhythmic interplay between Justin Trosper's guitar and Vern Rumsey's thunderous bass. The lyrics could have been plucked from one of Gollum's riddles in The Hobbit: "Break me I'm not broke/ Take me I'm not took/ Cake me I'm not cooked/ Fake me I'm not fucked/ Wake me I'm awake/ Shake me I'm a jerk/ Wash me I'm a lake/ Make me I'm a crook." And there's a lot more where that came from. The song then gets plucky, quieter, and more tense. A phrase repeats itself with just a hint of cello and some Rhodes accompaniment. With every repetition the cello grows louder until it overtakes the guitar, drums, and bass completely. A psychotic string interlude follows, and without warning, the cello cuts out completely, signaling the beginning of section three, a pretty tune with a ghostly Rhodes melody and two wiry, intertwined guitars parts.
If you're looking for another installment of The Future of What, or a return to New Plastic-era Unwound, you will be sorely disappointed. Let it go. You'd be doing yourself a heinous disservice to dismiss these songs for not reprising the Unwound of old; there's so much in the latest version of the band to be excited about. "Treachery" begins with a zany, Eno-ish synth intro which perfectly sets up the strangely 60's pop-sounding verse. From a production standpoint-- if not also from a songwriting one-- Trosper was inspired by Woodstock-era psychedelia, and this song is one of many moments in which that's distinctly recognizable. The band shifts keys between the verse and the chorus, and the keyboard is brought back for the song's infectiously sing-alongy ending.
In the years that elapsed between Challenge for a Civilized Society and their latest, the band pieced together a home studio in order to emancipate themselves from the time and cost constraints of professional studio work. They also decided to step up in a hands-on producer capacity, though still keeping studio wizard Steve Fisk around for his expertise. Ex-drummer Brandt Sandeno and Quasi drummer Janet Weiss add keyboards and vocals, respectively. But apart from bringing in the Pacific Northwest all-stars, having a studio of their own has seemingly afforded Unwound unlimited time to see every idea out to its end. Unfettered by the usual studio pressures, the band packed much more instrumentation than usual into the songs.
Leaves Turn Inside You is much too massive and sprawling an album to discuss track by track. There aren't really any bubbly or anthemic songs (such as Fake Train's "Dragnalus") or anything of the throat-shredding screams Trosper is well-known for (like on The Future of What's "Here Come the Dogs"). The length of the album is somewhat mind-numbing, as is the relatively slow tempo of most of the songs. But any loss in kinetic energy is more than made up for by the august musicality of the songs, as well as the sort of dream logic that pervades the album from beginning to end, effected with surreal vocal effects and keyboard atmospherics. The funny but disconcerting animated piece by Zak Margolis (aka Drowning Boy) and the video short by Slater Bradley are great but, ultimately, just the icing on an incredible album.
To be truthful, my first listen to Leaves Turn Inside You was a bit difficult; I wasn't even particularly sure that I liked it. I haven't been able to oust it from the stereo since. I'm convinced that, if you've been following this band's development, the initial bewildered expression on your face will give way to total enchantment, and this new, boldly different Unwound album will have you in its grip for months to come.
