It seems hard to believe that Unwound turns 10 years old this year. Rooted in the Olympia, Wash., punk scene of the early '90s, the trio has remained remarkably vital -- and impressively free from the vicissitudes of the "alternative" industry -- while still maintaining its signature sound.
Details
Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7, at 9 p.m.
Rainer Maria and Juno open
Tickets are $13
885-0750
Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell (at Polk), S.F.
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After a handful of sketchbooklike singles, Unwound debuted its vision fully formed on the 1993 LP New Plastic Ideas, an album of feedback-heavy bristle punctured by strident vocals, all borne along a tidal ebb and flow. Taking its energy from hardcore punk and its dissonance from early Sonic Youth, the threesome carried this pensive abrasiveness across subsequent albums, anchoring horizontal drift with weighty dub rhythms. Now, on Leaves Turn Inside You -- Unwound's sixth full-length and first studio album in three years -- the band forgoes past explorations of velocity and volume, testing the limits of nuance and restraint instead.
The record is that treacherous temptation of the progressive rocker: a double album. To its credit, however, Unwound uses the format no more indulgently than you might enjoy a long weekend. The shimmering drones of the opener, "We Invent You," seem to announce that time will move when Unwound says it may, while "Look a Ghost," a ballad full of odd phrasings and deceptive time signatures, strains against forward motion. Unwound's angular guitars are present as always, but on "December," they're updated with a newfound lyricism and a willingness to cease chafing and take a moment to reflect. Vocalist Justin Trosper even plays down his typically rough-throated delivery in favor of a deadpan sneer. The narcotic haze of Disc 2's "One Lick Less," ringing with bowed guitars and bent under the weight of Trosper's effects-laden vocals, epitomizes the distance that the band has traveled from its blistering hardcore roots: The song is more shoegazer pop reverie than steel-toed punk impact.
But beneath the variances in dynamics and shading, Unwound's commitment to beautiful din is unshaken. The bass-led first-disc closer "Off This Century" is as simply effective as anything off 1995's startlingly bleak The Future of What, and "Below the Salt" reprises the same sprawl that shaped New Plastic Ideas. While there's more reverb and the addition of a piano on Leaves Turn Inside You, the impulse remains the same: a vast unspooling of sound, where feedback singes the edges of song and discordancy frays into harmonic ambivalence.
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