No Energy

About

No Energy is a compilation box set by the band Unwound. Review by Sam Hockley-Smith: No Energy is essential even without that information. Listening to these box sets in order (don’t do it all at once), Unwound’s growth is clear: they moved from scrappy punk band with interesting ideas to a musically precise machine, harnessing feedback squalls, goopy drums, and guitars that sounded like they were repeatedly bashed against a brick wall, in an effort to approach dark transcendental bliss through repetition and coiled tension. In the liner notes for No Energy, drummer Sara Lund writes, “We learned to communicate absolutely with our instruments, and while we were playing together, all personal tensions were erased. This band played with intention, never intending anything specific beyond honest expression.” If you think about Unwound from this angle, the band is cast in a spiritual light, and it makes sense. So much of the music here, from “Natural Disasters” to “Disappoint” to the fuzzed out tonal scrape of “Vern’s Answer to the Masses”, is head-spinning and angry, but very deeply so. Like Lund, bassist Vern Rumsey, and guitarist/singer Justin Trosper had made peace with whatever was roiling inside them by obsessively pushing it outward. You can hear it on “Corpse Pose”, presented here in two forms, and as close to a signature Unwound song as you’re going to get. A walking bassline is almost immediately cut through with stabs of guitar that sound like what would happen if grunge quit aiming for cheesy guitar solos and played around with post-punk’s empty space. On its own, “Corpse Pose” makes a case for Repetition as the definitive Unwound album, but that doesn’t mean it eclipses the other gems to be found on the second half of this set: “Lowest Common Denominator” lurches and sways, with Trosper singing in a deadpan that leans toward simmering rage, and “For Your Entertainment” is basically a preview of the Unwound that would come later: Trosper’s voice oscillates between a blocky scream and an elliptical monotone. The Unwound we hear on No Energy is a prime version of the band. They’re still straddling their punk roots and their experimental side with ease: dipping into dub on the soft, completely bizarre-in-this-context “Sensible”, playing with time signatures on the hectic “Murder Movies”. The songs here careen. This is the sound of a band that has no interest in saving any of their ideas for later, or calming down to think about what they’re doing. Amidst all the sonic density, there’s an audible joy of creation, even in retrospect, knowing that they would soon fall apart. Lund backs this up in the liner notes, writing that as the band’s “personal bonds dissipated, the music only got stronger.” She also mentions that communication was never their strong suit, which is key to understanding how this band worked so well, and also how it eventually stopped working. The one constant through every Unwound album is that the trio, and assorted contributors, worked with a set of unspoken, nearly primal rules: feedback dissolves into nothing and riffs repeat hypnotically to the point that they sound like they’re about to crust over and splinter. Trosper, Lund, and Rumsey made music almost telepathically—they wrote on impulse and without pretension. They’re unique because they did this with so much control. Every note here sounds carefully considered, and just as carefully, every idea is left hanging before it can fully be seen through. There is no payoff except the lack of payoff. Once you accept that, their music becomes meditative. Unwound are complicated enough to stay a cult favorite forever, but Numero’s reissue campaign goes a long way to placing them in the context they deserve. Listening now, they are still the kind of band that you can cherish deeply. They were so good at expressing alienation and discontent, that loving them said something about the way your brain worked and where you were willing to let your thoughts go. Nothing’s changed.

via Last.fm