Music Review: Unwound, Rat Conspiracy (box set)

By Pres. Bystander

Unwound’s output from 1993 and 1994 is built on contradiction. Hyperactivity and hyperfocus in equal measure. It is the sound of deeply ADHD kids who alternately forgot to take their pills, took too big a dose, or self-medicated themselves into a stupor. This is the sound of blast-off, free fall, weightlessness, and submersion. Tension colors every corner, as does suffocation and kicking against the heavy blanket that covers.

Rat Conspiracy collects Fake Train (1993), New Plastic Ideas (1994), and assorted seven-inches, compilation appearances, and stray tracks from 1993 and 1994. It chronicles the birth and infancy of Unwound Mach-II, the trio of guitarist-singer Justin Trosper, bassist Vern Rumsey, and drummer Sara Lund, who replaced original drummer Brandt Sandero. The collection serves as a laboratory journal for the trio’s chemistry experiment—the synthesis of disparate styles, influences, and personalities.

Influences are worn like patches hand-stitched on a worn black denim jacket and then torn off and trampled on the floor of a rented room in a Unitary Church or VFW Hall. Songs are whipped up to a post-hardcore froth only to spin out in a no-wave whirl. Jagged Ginn-ian guitar figures cut across beds of rolling, throbbing, pigfuck-indebted bass and drums. Nods and allusions abound—intentional or not—from the immaculately accidental-looking Tom Jones and Sun Ra collage of Fake Train’s cover, to the chant of “White sugar, always chalk it up” on “Usual Dosage,” which is either a unconscious crib or a sly nod to the Nation of Ulysses’ refrain of “Cough Syrup, why don’t you cough it up” from their song “Perpetual Motion Machine” released two years earlier.

The tension and anxiety manifest themselves in the push and pull between the lyrical content and vocal delivery and between the cyclical bass lines and rolling drums and the angular and hauntingly discordant guitar. The box set opens with “Dragnalus” off of Fake Train, where Unwound marked the beginning of the new era. The song starts with a slightly hesitant two-note riff. The bass and drums join in, propelling the track along. Ostensibly a lyrical lament of boredom, stasis, and ineffectuality, the music crackles with the uncoiling of pent-up energy as Justin’s disaffected mumble shifts to howled menace, turning the message of the lyrics outward—fuck boredom. Only the boring stay bored.

Three and a half minutes later and the band has lost control and is frothing at the mouth declaring, “This is the mystery, the final count me out” in “Lucky Acid,” a caustic ego-death fever dream. “Lucky Acid” aptly expresses, both lyrically and sonically, the terror of handing over control to impulse. Elsewhere, the impulsiveness yields to doubt and stasis and a sinking feeling that “the sunrise was a lie” (“Kantina”) and all this effort is “not worth the fucked up mystery” (“Honoursis”). But, the frantic and frenetic resurfaces on 1993’s 7” song “Totality” with the near incomprehensible screams of “I’m only waiting for the total eclipse, and I’m not sorry for that anymore” over a driving post-hardcore burner. Once again, while the words signal resignation, the music demands with action.

New Plastic Ideas expands and improves the experiment, controlling the tantrums, pushing against the edges with extended instrumentals (“Abstraktions”), and honing what some critics at the time described as “beautiful ugly music.” New Plastic Ideas is moody, sad, and surly. But most of all, it is rich with submerged but heartbreaking riffs and refrains as found in “Envelope” and “Arboretum.”

The music can be punishing, as any cathartic experience should be, but is ultimately rewarding. The songs and sound Unwound cobbled together by whittling down the square peg to fit the star-shaped hole hold up 20 years on. Rat Conspiracy evokes the malice and malaise of young adulthood. This work is instantly recognizable as a piece of the early ’90s post-grunge indie-whatever wave. But instead of feeling dated, it speaks to the trans-generational struggle between wanting to re-purpose and improve what came before and the sinking feeling that it isn’t worth the trouble. Maybe Trosper sensed that Unwound was onto something when he declared “so it’s history, you can count me out, it’s not apathy, it’s incomplete” in New Plastic Ideas‘ final track “Fiction Friction,” but could not resist the impulse to dismiss the idea. With Rat Conspiracy, as the second Unwound box set, the Numero Group makes the case that history has other plans.

Rat Conspiracy, the second installment in the Numero Group‘s four-part Unwound reissue undertaking, was released on March 18.