There were dead rats in the walls of Steve Fisk’s Avast! Studios in Seattle, recounts the liner notes of the new Unwound box set Rat Conspiracy, when the trio of drummer Sara Lund, bassist Vern Rumsey, and singer-guitarist Justin Trosper convened there in March of 1994 to mix their album New Plastic Ideas. After hours upon hours at the board, it got to be too much. Mingling with the perpetual pall of stale cigarette smoke in the studio, the stench of decomposing rodent was so bad that Lund had to run outside just to catch her breath.
Murky, anxious, asphyxiating: That’s the atmosphere *New Plastic Ideas—*and its 1993 predecessor Fake Train—conveys. The Olympia-based band had recorded and aborted what would have been their debut 12” in 1992, originally slated for the new local label Kill Rock Stars, but drummer Brandt Sandeno had quit before it could come out. The album was shelved (later to be released as Unwound, included in the recent Kid Is Gone box set) and Lund was brought aboard. Her liquid, unhurried drumming only added to the group’s gooey undertow. Old songs were scrapped and new ones written to accommodate this uncharted chemistry. It seemed to seep everywhere at once—grunge, pigfuck, indie-rock, post-hardcore, punk—collecting residue as it went along. In a decade where anti-packaging was the ultimate irony, Unwound cloaked itself in the dirty earnestness of necessity.
Rat Conspiracy collects Fake Train and New Plastic Ideas along with a third album of 7” singles, radio sessions, compilation appearances, and unreleased tracks from 1993 and 1994. Together they comprise Unwound’s first true statement. It’s a garbled one. From the lazily sadistic whiplash of “Dragnalus” to strangulated stasis of “Feeling$ Real”, Fake Train lurches, twists, and turns in on itself, as if manifesting some perverse, extended metaphor for the feedback that laces nearly ever track. “I don’t feel strange/ I don’t feel at all”, Trosper mumbles on “Dragnalus” like a kid made to stand in the corner. Then he screams his fucking face off.
That drift between hesitance and horror underscores “Lucky Acid,” in which Trosper’s vocals wander in as if the mic got turned on too late; soon the muted jangle of his guitar swells into a Morse-code distress call banged out on naked nerve endings. And the trilogy of “Valentine Card”, “Kantina”, and “Were, Are and Was or Is”—Fake Train’s own “The Wonder”, “Hyperstation”, and “Eliminator Jr.”—not only mimic Sonic Youth in structure, but in the delicate, dissonant, Daydream Nation-esque instrumental “Were, Are and Was or Is”. But Rumsey’s blood-chugging bass line on “Valentine Card” is pure Jesus Lizard, even as Lund’s impressionistic percussion dots the rhythm.
There’s sausage being made here, but gristle keep clogging up the grinder. “Ratbite”, the album’s lone hardcore song, comes on like an homage to Wire’s “1 2 X U” as filtered through Minor Threat and a broken bottle of Robitussin. Vintage punk gets more directly referenced on the bonus track “Census,” a cavernous noise spasm from 1994’s “Negated” 7” that ends with a sample of Billy Idol’s goofy line “A heavy heavy dub, punk rockers!” from the throwaway Generation X song “Wild Dub,” a dub version of their 1978 song “Wild Youth.” Echoes of echoes of echoes—yet with Unwound they congeal into a fugue of fucked-up signifiers as thick with collagist subversion as Fake Train’s Tom Jones-on-Sun Ra cover art.
Of the remaining bonus tracks, “Unsympathetica”, “Untitled 1”, and “Untitled 2” are previously unreleased. All three are napkin-drawn blueprints for songs that never were. Together they shed light on Unwound’s shambolic writing process, a jam-based unraveling of knots of ideas rather than an act of construction. “Untitled 2” goes so far as to verge on start-stop, hard-rock swagger, more the area of expertise of Unwound’s close friends and contemporaries Karp. The sludge-shoveling “Mkultra”, from the 7” of the same name, could have even been a Karp cover. Rat Conspiracy’s only actual cover, though, is of the Minutemen’s “Plight”—and its throbbing atmospherics, entwined voices, and elegant spirals of abrasion are treated as both tribute and birthright.
New Plastic Ideas is less a product of its input and more of a refinement of its lack thereof—a process of weeding out, as it were, regarding Unwound’s blatant inspirations (Black Flag very much among them). There’s a huge leap in articulation here, both in gesture and enunciation, from Fake Train. “Entirely Different Matters” masters one of Trosper’s guitar trademarks, a layered, symphonic squeal of opening feedback, while “Usual Dosage” does the same for another, the crystalline dissonance of harmonics. But the dynamics refuse to lapse into patterns, as the pinpoint noise-squibs made predictable by Fugazi are deployed with counterintuitive chaos. On “Envelope”—one of Unwound’s most indelible songs, a study in inverted, charred-hearted near-pop—melody morphs into menace and is never resolved. By the time the seven-minute sprawl of “Abstraktions” (which features Fisk on keyboards) veers down a harrowing, Side-Two-of-Joy-Division’s-Closer corridor, the shape of Unwound to come has been all but sketched out.
Seeing Unwound in a freezing warehouse in the mid-90s was glimpse into that future. Wrapped in ratty scarves, playing with fingerless gloves, their breaths curling like smog in the frigid cold, they lugged around with them a miasma of sourness. Their music didn’t move the air in the room so much as curdle it. Their records to date—meticulously overdubbed, immaculately raw—had not been ample warning. What the hell was going on? This was a DIY punk show; it was supposed to feel in some way collective and cathartic. Instead—like Lund in the mixing room during the New Plastic Ideas sessions—those of us in the sparse audience were struck numb and left gasping for oxygen. Unwound had sucked it all in, stunk it all up, fed it back to us as a sad, blackened racket.
Fake Train and New Plastic Ideas hold important places in the history of 90s music, not to mention those of punk and indie as a whole. And they set the tone for unimagined Unwound greatness to come (which will be chronicled in subsequent volumes of the box-set series). But those two albums, and the tracks that accompany them on Rat Conspiracy, transcend time, place, attitude, and even the sprawling continuum of influence. More than any other records of their generation, they embody a paradox that disaffected youth has been stabbing at since the advent of rock ’n’ roll: how it feels to be cocooned among strangers in utter alienation, yet stand as one.
