Unwound - Leaves Turn Inside You
Finally make it out of bed several hours after you first woke up. Stand in the shower for what feels like hours after the timer's run out, head leaning against the stall, eyes closed, not thinking about anything, not noticing the hot water pounding against yr back. Pull on the same jeans and jumper you've been wearing for weeks over cleaner underwear and shirts (a friend of mine once referred to it as a 'depression suit'). Drive to work by the same route you take every day, so on autopilot you can't even recall any details of the journey. Work for hours, always returning to fix mistakes because you seem unable to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. Waste time posting inanities on the internet. When yr mind wanders try not to annoy yr friends by texting the same inanities. Try to push away the feelings you know are no good for you; you'd rather have a friend than romance besides who would ever feel that for you (but still catch yrself wondering as you're going to sleep what it'd be like to be in her arms). Wait for everyone else to leave the office. Eat some horrible and questionably vegan takeaway for dinner. Try to study over dinner. Read the same paragraph fifty times. Go out, maybe see yr friends and escape it for a few hours. Maybe not feel it and leave after one band, wishing you could pull yrself out of it to talk to people and enjoy shit. Go back to the office. Write down lame attempts at profundity to try and describe this feeling in songs that will never get written because you don't play guitar much. Try to get more work or study done. It takes four hours longer than it should because you can't concentrate on anything. Drive home on autopilot. Think about these travels like you'd shoot it in a movie: soundtrack of hastily strummed guitars that you think of as 'shoegaze' or 'krautrock' even though neither description is really accurate, but, you know, like that scene in Lost in Translation with the MBV song. Get home in time to sit on the couch with law and order on in the background, trying to draw or play guitar and coming up creatively bankrupt. Go to bed late enough to ensure you won't be out of bed until midday again the next day. Repeat.
That's been my life for like the last month or so, off and on. This record has been the soundtrack to it.
I can't say much about Unwound. They started in 1991 and broke up ten years later. They played that music that was the whole mix of post hardcore and indie and whatever. They used cheap guitars, effects and crappy solid state amps that would cut out in mid-song and switch back on when smacked with a flat hand or headstock. This record (their last) was made over two years at their own studio. The drummer was phenomenal and any time some guitar store douchebag is like 'girls just can't play rock drums man' play them 'scarlette'.
I've got no real reference points for this band. They're pretty fucking definitively 90s sounding to my mind but I slept on them up until like two years ago. This shit would have been life altering to me had I heard it in highschool when I was discovering bands like this. As it is now I've got a whole amazing back catalogue of a band that seems incredible in some way I can get from bands that are around now. And as I said this particular album has been the soundtrack to that weird, metronomic, repitive depression lifestyle I've had for a while now.
Enjoy.
