Review Summary: Morbidly beautiful; Unwound bid their discography farewell right before we got a proper taste at what they had up their sleeves.
Autumn. Unwound. My two favorite things, combined into a 1 hour, double disc album. A swan song so good some would say it overshadows the rest of the scene’s output. A household name people are too intimidated to utter. A masterpiece that people have yet to truly understand.
Leaves Turn Inside You is a very important album to me. Although the album was released 3 years before my birth, to this day it still feels new and special. It’s like nobody’s been able to match it since, or, better put, everyone’s too scared to try and outdo it. Judging by the fact this album isn’t the number 1 release on this website, it is greatly underrated. I don’t care if it's got a 4.02 rating, it still is underrated. For as long as it doesn’t have a perfect 5 star rating on here, it will remain under-appreciated, as 5 stars is the only score fit for this album.
Now, I will paint a picture for you: A fall afternoon, you’re walking on cold glass that feels slightly wet with each step but isn’t wet enough to become mud. You walk up a fairly steep hill, enough to where you feel exhausted by the time you’re at the top. You’ve got earbuds on, you’re listening to Below The Salt as you reach the very top.
You flop backwards against a pile of leaves below the tree they fell from, the sky is grey and the wind is chilly. Faint, muted rays of sunshine make their way out of the clouds casting quiet lights onto the empty field. The soft piano dances through the tense atmosphere as the bass and drums waltz to an intoxicating rhythm that is loose and lax, but still gives a feeling of tightness. The mass emptiness felt in the song becomes lost in the isolated fields you lay on as the leaves crunch and crumble under your weight. You fill your air with the lifeless, lonesome autumn air. A momentary respite found in your lonesome is welcomed after a routinely restless daily commute, and for just a moment you feel free in a dead man’s land.
This album is autumn, and autumn is this album. A match made in heaven, star crossed lovers. A season that sets the mood of an album, said album setting the mood for the season. The distant crushing hollowness of fall forms a strong bond with the thumping basslines, freeform drum parts and razor-sharp guitar stabs. Each moment of silence and reprieve building up to an explosive melancholy, epically grand bursts making way for moments of peace and quiet.
The lyrical themes touched upon in this album are a lot more abstract than in previous releases. While albums like 1995’s “The Future of What” spoke of unbridled nihilist downcasts derived from failed relationships and socio-political disillusion, Leaves Turn Inside You has a more mellow approach to themes of heartburn, civil unrest and romantic deterioration as opposed to their previous releases that took a more aggressive approach to these topics. The exceptions to these rules would be a track like “Scarlette”, which is straightforward in Mr Trosper’s disappointment with a previous partner and his ever-lasting feeling of having been used.
A great example of this more restrained lyrical approach would be “December”. On a previous Unwound project, the song would be violent, fierce and brutal, but on Leaves it’s sorrowful, lamenting and desperate. The retelling of an argument between bassist Vern Rumsey and his wife amidst a rough patch in their marriage being poeticized into a tortured tale of grief, denoting how they’d spend plenty of December nights crying and holding their lives by the whims that govern conversations.
From looking at the tracklist and its lyrics, I think a song that perfectly encapsulates the record is Look A Ghost. It is by far the most well known song on the whole effort and for good reason; the genius guitarwork, hypnotizing vocal delivery and whimsical structure makes for a pleasant earworm, but it also strides in lyrically summing the album. It speaks of a failed romance utilizing a ghost as a metaphor. That’s exactly how you can describe this record, it’s ghost-like -haunted, even. The statement was recorded and mixed in the basement of Justin Trosper’s supposedly haunted home in rural Washington (which douvled as the now-defunct Mag Rec One studio), and if any paranormal ghoul society can’t prove the shack was haunted, this album can. It’s eerie, chilling, foreboding but oh so beautiful.
Vulnerability. It’s a key factor in Unwound’s lyrical theming and, while having a lot of the angst that riddled their previous compositions removed from it, it does very much show. To recall the previously mentioned tracks, the contents of the lines uttered in Leaves are personal and raw whilst drowning in a layer of melancholy that was previously absent on other releases. Other songs like October All Over and Summer Freeze utilize the ever-morphing seasons as metaphors for indulgence in one’s nostalgia. The record wears its turmoil on its sleeve and it benefits greatly from it.
Leaves Turn Inside You closes off on a satirical note. The grand finale swan song “Who Cares” begins as an epilogue to opener “We Invent You” before switching to a mariachi band sample, with a reversed, reverberated recording of Sir Trosper saying “thanks for nothing!” marks the lyrical end to the experience; the ultimate piss-take.
So, now the leaves are growing back. The previously muffled rays dominate the clouds and take control of the skylines. The once cold, refreshing air becomes heated and suffocating and the grass gains its warmth again. It is now time to go back home until next october, until next year when the skies turn gray again; but for now, it is over and you better be heading back.
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Attribution: https://rateyourmusic.com/music-review/zod_/unwound/leaves-turn-inside-you/136009305
