Review Summary: Leaves turn inside us.
Nine people united with their ears and came away with their words.
Emotions Are Deciduous - TVC15
And there I was. Fourteen and staring at my laptop screen. Those two minutes of droning confused my young brain. I have long since mentally lost any sense of keeping time; I’d recall eating my lunch from yesterday and thinking it happened a few hours ago. So the last four years have been a giant blur. Like the accumulation of watercolours when painting over mistakes. But I can never forget the droning. It felt like ten minutes the first time; today, only ten seconds. A year (or a few months?) after discovering
Leaves, there was Scarlette... like the hair of my first girlfriend and the leaves which have ingrained themselves in my memory that fall. Lifeless, and reluctantly being pulled by the wind’s demands, were those leaves inside me from then on. And as time flew by, the leaves formed a cycle like the seasons and those ducks in what had become my favorite novel,
The Catcher in the Rye. Today, the cycle has come full circle once more and my journey with this album has reached another destination. For now, the ducks are still in the lake and trying to imbibe the Summer freeze of home. But once that body of water freezes over and it's October all over again, Scarlette may come back to haunt me. Still. There’s not much to analyze at this point. Nothing this album or I haven't encountered before.
The Young Iconoclast - Claire
Unwound, one of my earliest musical loves. As a thirteen-year-old who was a dedicated non-conformist, I jotted down on an assignment “October All Over” as my favourite song. What appeal did I derive from something so proudly resigned and bleak? After all, what drips from Justin Trosper’s vocal performance and lyrics is nothing less than apathy so intense that it intimidates. Perhaps it’s the ultimate act of loftiness, to push away everyone and everything that isn’t the self at its very emptiest. Nothing is needed, we still survive - and I can’t think of a more potent declaration of strength than that. And so, young Claire, who sometimes ate in the halls alone and feared many of her peers, decided that she too could live on. “October All Over”, the anthem of her birth month, was chosen as an encapsulation of the (admittedly exaggerated) angst that she felt. And a couple of years later, the stony-faced
Leaves Turn Inside You still serves as a reluctant welcome mat to my internal retreat.
Exegesis - jack
The ‘ghost’ that Unwound flirts with in track two sort of trails close behind throughout this record’s entirety. Half the time, the thing is too exhausted to haunt the audience that it’s holding captive (see: One Lick Less). Elsewhere, though, it finds its impetus in a knife-edged riff that stretches itself up into the most lucid of headspaces (see: Scarlette). It’s an indomitable piece of music, even selfish in a way – self parodying and glazed over with defeat. Perfect, I think, for a late night and my broken dam of a bedroom window (middle-aged neighbours, meet Unwound. Unwound, meet middle-aged neighbours). But yeah,
Leaves Turn… acknowledges all of your formative moments and treats them with a wistful shrug of the shoulders, guiding you (affectionate but disaffected) through sequences both meandering and utterly, utterly imposing. It is vast and constantly hyperventilating, like the sky torn asunder, and it is – quite fittingly – an intensely communal experience. In short: it’s very fucking good.
Aperture - FullOfSounds
I like imagery. Connecting imagery to music is one of my favorite experiences. Unwound created this immediately upon the opening drones of “We Invent You”; from the first guitar tones and dreamy yet dreary vocals of Justin Trosper, I was swept into a swampy and apocalyptic world. I imagine Sara Lund, Unwound's drummer, holding this world together with her reverb'd cymbal crashes and noisy, yet stable drumming keeping the structure of each song in check. “Terminus” is where the world really changes into something else. One of the most anxious, yet also most beautiful songs on the album, it transitions from bleak strings to calm beauty with a reverb effect paired with settling guitar lines. As the calm progresses into sadness, it's ever apparent that a dark cloud looms over this internal world. Everything feels heavier. The words are tortured, especially on “Scarlette”, where Justin takes a manic approach to the vocals. Sara's cymbal crashes feel even stronger on “Below the Salt”, with its mixture of depressing piano chords. The song explodes with Sara holding everything together like her life depends on it. And just when you think that it’ll all be torn apart, “Who Cares” brings us back to the eerily tranquil beginning. It’s the perfect closer, one that makes you contemplate everything that just happened and the deep sadness that looms over the world of
Leaves. Now, as I’m writing this with
Leaves on repeat, summer light is flooding in; it's hot and humid. But this album's atmosphere and imagery still elicit an opposite world. That's the beauty of imagery in art, and no album pulls this off like
Leaves Turn Inside You.
Dysphonia - Frivolous
This album is built for the cold, I think, the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and leaves a weight you can’t seem to shake off for a long time. Justin’s voice seems to be infected with that weight. He struggles to move forward, muttering mantras to himself (“
She never had a chance / So now she’s coming back for you”) in an attempt to make sense of it all. His voice gradually grows more and more desperate, moving from the dreamy, drawn-out moans of “We Invent You” to the creaking shouts of “Scarlette”. The cold persists throughout the album, gnawing at Justin’s strength, until his voice is reduced to whispery moans on “Below the Salt”. The only respite he can get, the only one he’ll allow himself, is a cold, bitter smile as he asks himself “who cares”.
End of Reel - ianblxdsoe
I imagine purgatory (if there is such a thing) would be a gripping stagger for our senses. Sure, it would most likely be physically
nothing, but inside our heads, nothing means so much more. The human mind is capable of producing so many chemical emotions and
Leaves Turn Inside You is an opus of all. It’s the final plug-pull of life support, it’s the dolphin-dive into the abyss, it’s the howling spiritual void of silence that I imagine to encounter in this “purgatory”. Such emotional stimulation and sonic mania is hard enough to even comprehend. Nothing like
Leaves Turn Inside You will or ever could be replicated. The experiences and atmospheres this album offers rivals nothing else I know of.
Leaves Turn Inside You is the cry for help from a child on the street, as he’s watching the world end around him. It’s the screams of terror during the end of the world. It’s the battle, while also embodying the ceasefire of the same battle. It’s the thrilling rush of dopamine and adrenaline in the darkest fight-or-flight that sound has to offer. There’s a feeling of self defeat, in giving up a crutch, but the album carries you home as fast as it disables you.
Leaves Turn Inside You is the most manic, panic attack-inducing experience you’ll ever have. And it’s also the best goddamn antidote for such a thing.
Alone, But For The Drone - pjorn
I was ripped in two. In the midst of a manic episode in November of 2009, I drove by myself across the country to Buffalo, New York. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere at about 3AM, I steered with my knees at roughly 90 mph, searching for a distraction from the weeks-long panic attack I was having. A friend had given me some burned discs a few months before and I found them forgotten and buried in the back of my CD binder. I grabbed one labeled
LEAVES and shuffled it into my CD player. While the disc was being read, I accidentally dropped my cigarette, littering embers all over my lap and the cloth seat. I frantically grabbed the cherry and tried to toss it out the window -- burning my hand in the process. It hurt. I yelled. The opening notes droned. I let my arm hang out the window so the cold air could soothe the pain, and the drone continued. I felt my hand throbbing, agonisingly swollen, and the drone continued. I stared at the white lines on the road, and the drone continued. That anxious drone cut through me. As the album was nearing its end for the second time, dawn seemed to take forever to break. I wasn't cured or fixed, but in that moment as I pulled into the motel parking lot, I felt separated. The drone continued. I laid in that bed, ripped in two.
Forest With No Trees - Onionbubs
You’re walking through the forest in October at dusk. Immediately, as you enter, you become immersed by the atmosphere of your surroundings. However, as time goes on dusk turns to night, shifting your state of mind from stunned to terrified. It begins with slight paranoia that eventually peaks as you start running in terror, attempting to find wherever you parked your car until you give up and collapse in exhaustion. After wasting all your energy, you rest on a tree stump and start take in your surroundings again as the panic fades. Only this time the bleak nature affects you differently. There’s still an appreciation for the scenery, but now it’s being overcome by increasing isolation. You realize how empty everything you do is, and how empty you are as a result. Despite this you soldier on. You later trip on a flashlight that you use to try to find a way out. You stumble back onto the path and it becomes increasingly familiar as you go along, but instead of relief you feel even emptier. It’s to the point that you can’t be bothered to care when your flashlight dies . You barely even feel any trace of relief when you finally reach your car. As you get in and turn on the radio, you accidentally turn to a station where your ears are graced with a humorous old-timey recording that makes you laugh a little. It’s one thing you didn’t expect to get out of this bleak, terrifying, depressing, and life-changing experience.
Who Cares? - Winesburgohio
In a way, it’s unfortunate that
Leaves Turn Inside You is fated to be most listeners’ first exposure to Unwound. It’s inevitable; though not my subjective favourite, it’s their objective opus, a crystalline distillation of everything that made them vital, with a few new tricks up their sleeves (“is that a fucking cello?”). But for the anhedonia to fully wash over you, for the nihilism to infuse into your blood, it’s essential to juxtapose it with the frenetic summer of their early post-hardcore, the autumnal confusion of
New Plastic Ideas and
Challenge, until we have winter. “Leaves turn inside you” Unwound promise, seasonal change felt internally until there’s nothing left but winter’s resignation and apathy. The album literally closes on a joke-track called “Who Cares?” Not Unwound, perhaps, but I do; the coruscating single angular note of Scarlette with a lyric sheet other bands would kill for (“Cross my heart and hope to die don’t recall the reason why”), the triptych of terminus, which is -- well, imagine if GY!BE were good. It’s ironic that to convey their torporous ennui they deploy an arsenal of visceral post-hardcore and noise-rock tropes, as well as inviting a coterie of orchestral musicians and Janet Weiss, soon to be famous in her own right; flinging everything they have against the wall to prove once and for all that they don’t give a shit. It’s this disjunct that draws me back. “Summers freezing here / please come back next year” pleads Justin Trosper. I’ve already booked my flights.
Winding Up: An Overview
Leaves Turn Inside You is coldness and isolation distilled into an auditory masterpiece. And so it’s not without some irony that Jack noted how our listening experience was enhanced by its communal nature. All of us, listening in tandem, were far removed from loneliness - yet still we could perceive it, staring us in the face, through every song. Of course,
Leaves Turn Inside You is far more than a simple recapitulation of one primitive feeling. The mirror here is darkened, but it reflects nonetheless.
