More minor chord than minor threat, Unwound ploughed a lonely musical furrow. While the band’s unwavering pursuit of their own cryptic, intense and macabre sound may not have made much of a ripple in the UK, the final instalment of an impressive reissue campaign from Numero Group, ‘No Energy’, should finally cement their legacy as one of more deliriously original and dark American rock bands of the post-Nirvana years.
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Akin to Nirvana, Unwound was a trio hailing from Washington State. With the same humble roots and mission, singer/guitarist Justin Trosper, bassist Vern Rumsey and second-and-final drummer Sara Lund made their fraught living by crafting an incredible degree of ugliness from their instruments, right down to the brutalist cover art adorning their LPs. And if three is a crowd, the trio always sounded more like a braying mob.
So when the Chicago-based archival label Numero Group improbably turned its attention to the group, it did what it’s done so well for other neglected bands and scenes. Ranging from the recreation of the eccentric 1960s soul scene in Wichita, Kansas, to the revival of Codeine's glorious slowcore, Numero has yet again turned water into wine by resurrecting Unwound.
Revisiting their murky world was a similarly eclectic choice, as the band never truly made it out of the American underground. Their recorded output has certainly never shined as brightly as it does now after the much-needed remastering saw more than 100 studio and live tracks forged into four lavish, yet suitably stark, box sets spanning their early high school days as Giant Henry to Unwound’s artistic zenith in 1996. The band went on to make two more superb records before their quiet dissolution in 2002, but those efforts remain untouched, perhaps left for another day.
However, few fans would have expected a fraction of this much love for the moody cult rockers. So the offering – which ranges from the Giant Henry years as goofy self-portrait-festooned Record Store Day 7-inches, to the awkward early years of the ‘Kid Is Gone’ three-LP box, through to the burgeoning power of the ‘Rat Conspiracy’ three-LP set and the concluding three records of the ‘No Energy’ collection – is a wonderfully exhaustive examination of their music from 1991 to 1996.
In those five short years, you can hear the band take its first steps out of their parents’ basements in Tumwater, Washington, arriving onto the national stage just a few years later. Whatever. It’s the past and so be it, right? The members of Unwound certainly thought the band had run its course, playing a gloriously redundant final show in their home state to bury themselves, pretty suits and ties and all. Good riddance, they said. Or in typical that gallows humour that always placed them in good stead, Trosper summed it all up: “Like, I'm done.”
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I think Unwound built something more, of more value: an idiosyncratic and instantly identifiable musical language…
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But from beginning to end, the music very clearly displays the extended bloody-mindedness that coloured their entire career. From the funereal ‘Corpse Pose’ dirge (listen, above) recorded for their roughly polished 1996 Echoplex-laden album ‘Repetition’ to the martyr-strewn ‘All Souls Day’ from 1994’s breakout, ‘New Plastic Ideas’, it seemed death, failure, contradiction, humiliation, conflict and transience were states of mind to be embraced, not shirked for the Pacific Northwesters. The group eventually toured themselves – and their interpersonal relationships – into the ground. Die, die, die, my darlings.
Looking at the first half of their career, the Giant Henry days are best left to completists only. But as archival documents go, it at least has a sense of humour as the band members’ cheesy school yearbook photos adorn the sleeve art. The music feels much more substantial on the first three-LP box set, compiling the high school and beyond era of the band in small-town Tumwater. Even this is fairly obscure stuff.
But helpfully, the band’s original (and largely forgotten) drummer Brandt Sandeno sheds light on their early ethos, was preserved throughout Unwound’s tenure, when he reflects: “The process was this: meet other freaks at school and become friends; practise relentlessly; perform with energy and volume; tour and make records. But I think Unwound built something more, of more value: an idiosyncratic and instantly identifiable musical language.”
While Unwound’s most loyal fans will have heard this music, most will have failed to fully understand the role that Sandeno played in Unwound’s trajectory. In retrospect, he turns out to be important as their first recordings were made in his parents’ basement in 1987 as drummer for Giant Henry. And as a footnote (and the Numero Group is very good at footnotes), Brandt and Trosper have since worked on other projects, from the acerbic Young Ginns to their current Sub Pop rock project, Survival Knife.
Giant Henry played its last show in 1991, sharing the bill with Bikini Kill after a no-show from Nirvana as Krist Novoselic was unable to make the gig. The same year, Unwound was born and the guys hit the road on their inaugural tour. Which is where the recordings kick in on the first collection, ‘Kid Is Gone’, culminating in Trosper’s blistering singing and Rumsey’s rumbling bass of the Kill Rock Stars-released ‘Kandy Korn Rituals’ 7” (listen, below).
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By the time the band reached the junction of 1993 and their ‘Fake Train’ album – the precise moment where ‘Rat Conspiracy’, the second Numero Group reissue, resumes with the band – Unwound had practised itself into a whole new league, thanks to the sharpening of its tools by extensive playing with Kathleen Hanna and company, and Washington DC pranksters, Nation Of Ulysses. And the rats? Named after the smell of Steve Fisk’s Avast! Studio in Seattle, apparently, and its rotting vermin stuck within the cheap plasterboard walls. Suitably, this second bundle contains music from Unwound that is suffocating and oppressive.
The high point of ‘Rat Conspiracy’ is the opening juggernaut of a tune, ‘Dragnalus’. “I… FEEL… STRANGE,” implores a squirming Trosper as the trio grinds its way through a deceptively simple yet thoroughly catchy tune. With Sandeno replaced by the band’s only other drummer, Lund, the group was finally gelling with frightening consequences. Jump to ‘Valentine Card’ (listen, below) and hear the future of Unwound’s sound unfold through Rumsey's punishingly effective bassline and the varied dynamics of the band, morphing from a gentle murmur to a full-on and visceral assault. “On stage, we combined punishment and transcendence,” Lund reflected.
In 1994, the band found itself at its next jumping off point when the ever-loyal Washington state label Kill Rock Stars released their next album, ‘New Plastic Ideas’. Marking another huge stylistic leap, Unwound had again redefined its sound by developing a Cure-like creep on the epic and eerie ‘Abstraktions’ or thrashing through the haunted hurt of ‘Usual Dosage’.
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So how could it be that a band in the midst of an impressive maturation could also be in the middle of such a profound rot? Looking back, Unwound appears to have always been in a state of decay by remaining staunchly opposed to everything grandiose or flash, merciless in their frankness and strictly punk as f*ck.
Or, as Trosper fondly remembers of this era: “I was into the idea of punishing the audience. If people are standing there, and it’s loud, if they really want to be there, they’ll stay. And yeah, you want people to like you, but there were times when I was like, tonight is about: Punish them.”
When asked what possessed Numero Group to revisit the Washington state rockers’ music, the label’s co-founder Ken Shipley (a former A&R manager at Rykodisc) replied: “After we finished Codeine, I started thinking of how we could follow it up. I pulled a stack of records from the 1990s out and started re-listening to them with my mid-30-year-old ears. Unwound still sounded fresh – they held up in a way that most stuff from that era doesn't.
“Later, when we started working on the sets, I figured out that their sound was the sound of a band that didn’t give a shit about following any current trend. And that's pretty much our motto, too.”
But the best from Unwound was still to come. 1995 and 1996 were the culmination of countless hours of practising, touring and, yes, punishment. And you can almost feel how those energies forced the music to evolve into something more clinical and distant, far stranger and certainly more compelling.
Sticking with producer Steve Fisk and Kill Rock Stars, they released two albums in 1995, ‘The Future Of What’ and ‘Unwound’ – the latter recorded in 1992 – and ‘Repetition’ followed in 1996, their sixth studio album. Both ‘Future’ and ‘Repetition’ showcased the band’s newfound ability to create fresh textures nestled deep within their edgy music.
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There were humans on the other side of those instruments, and with humanity comes fallibility…
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Lend an ear to the shrill guitar solo bridge on ‘Lowest Common Denominator’ as it pops up repeatedly as an ear-splitting moment of punctuation, allowing the rest of the song to stretch out. Or the unlikely dubby jam of ‘Sensible’, itself a ballsy exercise in getting out of their comfort zone to show just how far Rumsey’s bass playing had evolved. ‘Murder Movies’ and the majestic ‘Corpse Pose’ are his other four-string masterpieces from the ‘Repetition’ album, cementing him as the cornerstone of the band’s increasingly propulsive and angular sound.
Meanwhile, Lund’s improved and impressively complex drumming also deserves mention, especially on the tricky rhythmic shifts of ‘Devoid’. The deft runs allow her and Rumsey to sit back and stoke the engine, freeing Trosper to let the songs loose rather than take sole responsibility for their propulsion. So he sits back in the pocket of the groove and just gets weird. Thus, the blazing staccato riffs of ‘Go To Dallas And Take A Left’, with their faster/slower Joy Division type feel, complete with a sax and organ freak-out before it gets shut down.
The band’s Numero Group rediscovery comes to a stunning conclusion on a live version of ‘Swan’, where the song just feels exhausted before it finally runs out of steam, disintegrating into an extended fuzz of dreary, weary feedback. Summing up the chaos. Lund said poetically: “The universe Unwound created was not sustainable. Something had to give, and that something ended up being the band itself. Ironically, as our personal bonds dissipated, the music only got stronger.
“There were humans on the other side of those instruments, and with humanity comes fallibility. Communication was never our strong suit; things left unsaid for too long grew too big to ignore. Unwound was a beautiful, terrible, defining thing. The years have harboured bitterness and regret, at times overshadowing the value of our creation. But as we work on these reissues, it’s become possible to listen without bias, to appreciate without judgment.”
Hear, hear.
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Words: Geoff Cowart
Photos: Facebook (rotator image by Ben Clark)
Find these Unwound reissue sets on the Numero Group website.
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