It’s only fitting that what would become Unwound’s final album would end with what sounds like the music from a New Orleans funeral procession.
This is a tribute to the restless creative spirit of Unwound, and how that spirit still lives on. What is being laid before you is an extensively researched look at one of the most dauntingly great catalogs in this region’s much-celebrated rock scene, written by someone who I hope to god is at least somewhat qualified to do so. What lies ahead are thoughts, musings, and crucial secondhand insight on one of the Pacific Northwest’s most influential bands, breaking down all of their full-length releases in reverse chronological order. This is just a small handful of groups and projects outside of Unwound these artists have been involved in, even dating back to the band’s early days. The late Rumsey (who passed away in 2020) co-founded the great label Punk in My Vitamins Lund played in the Corin Tucker Band as well as Nocturnal Habits with Trosper, who also formed Survival Knife with founding Unwound drummer Brandt Sandeno. The band’s former members were and are wellsprings of creativity and advocacy for artists chasing down their most dynamic ideas. But I still hear Unwound damn near everywhere I go.Īs effusive as my words have been, as deep as my love for Unwound goes, this is not a stone tablet memorial for a band that broke up and never did anything significant since.
The band hasn’t released a note of music in the past two decades and never will again. You enjoy a band greatly influenced by them, or at the very least has cribbed a few of their tricks. Just know that if you like contemporary music even remotely associated with artsy, experimental, sorta fucked up rock music, you like a band that sounds at least a little bit like Unwound. The Our Band Could Be Your Life era was fading when they formed, zines had mostly gone back underground, and although their defining work as a band - 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You - received a flowery score of 9.0 on Pitchfork, Best New Music had yet to be conceived and the site’s notoriety as the most polarizing force in music criticism had yet to be reached.Īs much as I’d like to call out names, I’m going to refrain from doing so here for now. (The other headliner? Sonic Youth, who were also tapped to curate the festival.) Of course, this is near the inception of internet media’s discovery of the joys of online pranks, so more than a few people interpreted it as a hoax.īy their own admission when they embarked on an archival project to preserve the band’s legacy a decade later, Unwound mostly predated the internet.
Unwound broke up after their Olympia farewell show on April 1st, 2002, sometime after their co-headlining slot at the music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties in its inaugural United States event. The only act on the label that could possibly challenge Unwound’s stature was Sleater-Kinney, and KRS owner Slim Moon famously turned down signing his label’s other greatest-ever band at first. They were the first on the label to be given a full-length release perhaps arguably the group most synonymous with the label’s artistic fundamentals. Over the course of six albums ranging in quality from very good to truly immaculate, Unwound was for all intents and purposes the quintessential Kill Rock Stars band. They were grungy but not grunge pretty far removed from their longhaired, flanneled, and occasionally shirtless contemporaries 90 minutes to the north. They were voracious students of music and keen on experimenting with unique approaches, but knew exactly what not to try (or knew better than to let those ideas see the light of day).
The band - best known in their longtime iteration of singer/guitarist Justin Trosper, bassist Vern Rumsey, and drummer Sara Lund - were punk largely in the religious sense of the term, but also pretty fucking punk aesthetically. Whether you refer to their style as post-hardcore or good ol’ fashioned art-punk, the Tumwater-born, Olympia-bred trio followed their invisible muse down paths still being explored to this day. In terms of influence, the band cast a deep shadow that has yet to fade two decades after their breakup. Not to get too meta from the outset, but the fact that Unwound aren’t quite the household name they should be is mostly a symptom of online music criticism only being a nascent concern when they parted ways. As a memorial to their pervading influence, KEXP features writer, local music columnist, and veteran music critic Martin Douglas surveys Unwound's full-length discography in depth. On April 1, 2002, one of the most influential punk bands in a region teeming with influential punk bands broke up, leaving seven full-length albums and a slew of singles for the world.
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