Send "Unwound " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 Much of Unwound’s work is inaccessible, but Leaves Turn Inside You is different: it’s damn near impenetrable. Opening with two minutes of nothing but feedback, this seminal album swiftly transfers into a melancholic hodgepodge of epic post-rock, dream pop, noise rock, and moody, subdued instrumentals. Unwound do all these styles very well, along with the guitar-led, mellow yet lyrically anxious indie rock that dominates much of the rest of the album. But, problem is, they never provide an easy entry point, like an overwhelmingly catchy song to attach to as an introduction, or something. Even worse for newbies, this album is best to be listened to as a whole, which is not an easy task, considering it’s eighty minutes long and very ambitious.Of course, the work spent trying to immerse yourself in Leaves Turn Inside You will pay off immeasurably. While less direct and softer than Unwound’s other post-hardcore-cum-noise-rock stuff, the same general feel of angst and dread of those records remain, only a lot more overbearing, considering that a lot of the anger of those records is replaced with something more melancholic. Musically, Unwound shift and change their sound entirely into a sort of mid-tempo indie-rock (along with those other aforementioned genres), switching from the distorted (“Scarlette”), to the dreamy (“One Lick Less”), and to the epic (“Below the Salt”) with ease. Mind you, LITY is a very depressing listen. This is mostly due to singer Justin Trosper’s lonesome wail and the general plodding pace of the songs, among other things, like the sense of general dread the Godspeed-like “Terminus” creates. But it’s depressing in a good way; instead of being brutally direct with his declarations of angst, Trosper’s lyrics are much more emphatic and warming. This creates almost a therapeutic effect with the listener; LTIY, once icy and intimating, becomes a daily necessity....full text |
| Stylusmagazine |
| ast year, I ended up writing for my college's student paper. It was an interesting experience, but just as often a slightly maddening one. The travails of trying to pester source after source for relevant quotes aside, I did enjoy squeezing in the occasional record review. Usually I'd accept whatever I was assigned, only occasionally balking at the idea of trying to come up with 350-500 words on the latest Dave Matthews album or going to String Cheese Incident and Shaggy gigs (Alice Cooper, though, could've been interesting, but I had studying to do that night). Sometimes, though, I took it upon myself to try to proselytize about music or films I thought deserved attention. Most often, I was met with a blank stare, as was the case when I tried to explain to an editor (a devoutly religious [male] N*Sync fan, mind) what I meant, in one Canadian metal-band review, by "martial clangor" or trying for the seventh time to scan the glossy black cover of Unwound's Leaves Turn Inside You and turning up only fingerprints. (The graphics department got kind of annoyed with me after I handed them a Fela Kuti album cover depicting seventy of his topless wives, I think.) This was, after all, I snobbishly opine, a paper that unashamedly gave four stars to Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water. Draw your own conclusions. Most frustrating, I think, was the paper's insistence on one-sentence paragraphs of the Associated Press style. This, we all know, is of value and importance when the reader wants to know facts, but I often ran up against a wall when I found my wannabe-David-Foster-Wallace rhetorical serpents diced up into tadpoles. But, nonetheless, I am indeed glad I got to extol the virtues of one album, in particular, and that's Unwound's double-disc opus and my pick for best of the year thus far. So here's what I wrote, uncharacteristically terse as it may be, as much as it may sound I'm explaining Unwound to my parents:...full text |
| Expressmilwaukee |
| The turn of the century marked a creative, albeit not commercial, renaissance for indie-rock, a time when well-cemented bands as unlikely as Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse and Fugazi all churned out bold, expansive albums that skirted safety zones and, years later, stand as each band's best. Of all the ambitious studio masterpieces that surfaced between 1999 to 2001, however, none was as unexpected as Leaves Turn Inside You, the final album from Unwound. The Washington trio spent the better part of the '90s shouting out rabid, apothic post-hardcore, amassing a discography of great punk records, but for their swan song they retreated to the studio for three years, laboring over a measured, two-disc mind-fuck that eclipses even Radiohead's OK Computer. With fall in full force, now is as good a time as any for my semi-annual endorsement of this too often overlooked gem. A baleful album rife with demons, ghosts and lost time, Leaves weeds out ambivalent listeners right off the bat with the two minutes of unwavering drone that introduces the album opener "We Invent You." Those who stick with it, though, are rewarded once the song breaks, unleashing its oversized symphony of sighing, overlapping vocals; hazy, hypnotic guitar and glorious Mellotron. Most of these 14 songs are this orchestrated. They build to grand crescendos, break down into distinct movements and bind themselves with reoccurring motifs....full text |
Unwound lyrics
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