Are You Feeling Ahistorical? Unwound's 'Leaves Turn Inside You' Gets It

Post-rock outfit Unwound serves as an unlikely mouthpiece for the early 2000s. It's sonically jerky and mysterious Leaves Turn Inside You speaks to a collective sense of becoming ahistorical. 

Written by Zachary Bolash

Photo courtesy of Annie Musselman

Unwound's 2001 album Leaves Turn Inside You begins with a long, ear-piercing screech. The hymnic sound is so loud it triggers a reflexive reach for the volume knob. The uncanny noise also sparks inquiry into the sound's origin: what is it? Is it a synthesizer? A drone? A reverberated dog whistle? Just as the listener begins to discern the noise, it abruptly ceases. A beat of silence follows, and then, the mellow, not-quite grunge and non-quite punk wail of vocalist Justin Trosper pierces the listener’s ears with the despondent lyrics of the record's opening track when the moody singer groans, "We Invent You." "Save your grace / I'm going soon. The cacophony that anti-climatically fades into a droning post-rock track represents Leaves Turn Inside You's beguiling power. It is a sonic memorial to its moment: the early 2000s. 

The fin-de-siècle of the 20th century promised a new, rational world. Under neoliberalism's thumb, the geopolitical landscape seemed to arrive at a consensus,  achieving a mutually agreeable government. Communist states fizzled out, and statist economies charted the path toward free markets. A new millennium would roll turbulent global history's final credits. However, a novel and distinctly 21st-century problem was introduced: malaise. No more embarking on voyages of discovery, no trench wars against fascism or paid tributes to greedy imperials. Mutually agreeable neoliberalism homogenized life, and history seemed to reach a singularity point. The average 21st-century person's life seemed minuscule in the broad scope of history. They became, in a word, ahistorical.

Unwound, the Washington post-rock band composed of Justin Trosper, Sara Lund, Jared Warren, and Scott Seckington — who joined after Leaves Turn Inside You’s release — seemed to resonate with this temporal dread. Earlier albums like Fake Train and The Future of What pulsated with anger. On these records, Trosper wailed with a proto-emo sensibility about the classic grievances of being an artist: being misunderstood, unrequited love, and general discontent at the corporate world. However, on its final album, Leaves Turn Inside You, the band departs from its punky origins and charts on a much more subdued and melancholic path.

Audiologists could launch a science of genre taxonomy based on this album. Leaves Turn Inside You occupies the negative space of nearly every alternative genre, which is unsurprising as band members created the album through sonic experimentation and lyrical free association. The midpoint track of the album, "Off This Century," drips with grungy lyrics as Trosper declares, "It's every bastard for himself / The last century hasn't ended yet." Nevertheless, the song lacks essential grunge components; Trosper's vocals are too ephemeral for apt comparisons to grunge icons like The Smashing Pumpkins’ founder Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain. These genre discrepancies extend past "Off This Century." The eighth track "One Lick Less" is a slow-burn dream pop cut that plays  like a B-side from loveless-era My Bloody Valentine. Elsewhere, "Below The Salt" leans fully into post-rock with a seven-minute instrumental stretch with Trosper's dreary vocals wedged in at the end.

This genre-hopping, paired with the album’s gloomy themes, reflects the period's deeper cultural mood of malaise. By 2001, Unwound looked at the entire history of rock in retrospect. It was post-punk, post-post-punk, post-grunge, and seemingly post-everything new. Its music broad-strokes and synthesizes different subgenres of rock music in a way that should feel fresh. However, the album sounds like Trosper aggregated nearly every alternative rock scene..  It feels like a confused, yet compelling regurgitation of what came before. He fails to create a new sound, but it is remiss to call Leaves Turn Inside You a failure by any stretch of the word. The genre's indistinctness accesses deeper feelings in Trosper's frustration — both with music and the 21st-century.

The frustration is clearest when Trosper bridges punk with noise rock on "Treachery." The whiny  vocalist seems to self-soothe during the song's stuttering chorus in which he cries out "T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-treachery / Just breathe / T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-treachery / Just breathe" in a panicked mantra. This type of self-dialogue also appears on "December," a post-rock ballad where he interrupts his own thoughts: "By the whims that govern conversations / Wait! Hold on! / I'm not finished... fine!" It’s not just Trosper’s own failings he’s confronting, but the artistic onus to innovate and make something new in a world where everything already feels discovered.

Zooming out: Unwound had to release the album when it did. The record’s turbulent structure as it shifts between genres and Trosper's meta-dialogue speak to the characteristics of the incredibly frustrating period that is distinctly early-2000s. Previous rock acts had mimicked each other’s original themes and inflated the genre to its sonic edges. The torrenting and sometimes jerky sound of Unwound's Leaves Turn Inside You speaks to the grating boredom of a genre and, maybe more importantly, of a world, at a standstill.

Extending beyond rock, nearly every music genre shared this sentiment of feeling discontent. Pop became increasingly monolithic and lost its kooky ‘80s luster, with ‘90s and 2000s pop becoming increasingly commercialized. Rap had cycled in on itself, becoming a rat race of status. Across disciplines, it felt like the future had been flattened and other fields experienced this phenomenon. The 2000s marked the beginning of the scientific replication crisis, where science became more concerned with proving itself than discovery. In art and literature, political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously argued that society was approaching "the end of history."

Although the bleak commercial landscape fatigued many artists, the 2000s possessed a rich artistic gradient. Changing attitudes toward politics, gender, and sexuality unlocked new creative avenues for artists. Radiohead, in particular, reversed their earlier angsty sound with their cosmic, futuristic Kid A. Sufjan Stevens' 2005 album Illinois oozes with a flirtatious wonder at nature and the Chicago cityscape. While some artists saw the new millennia as an artistic stopping point, others were bewitched and tantalized by its new, futuristic promise. 

In retrospect, the ominous forecast of the bad-auguring Leaves Turn Inside You proved premature. For better or worse, humans possess a repulsion towards sameness. As a result, the seemingly impenetrable regime of neoliberalism is fracturing. What Leaves Turn Inside You presents is a sonic time capsule of a troubled, bored period. As Trosper wails on "Below the Salt": "I meant for something new / To make anything true."  Leaves Turn Inside You conveys human nature’s multiplicities, but the record also shows that the culture, or lack thereof, leave humans yearning for more.