AUDIO: October All Over

It's in that vein, then, that Unwound's Leaves Turn Inside You stands as such a remarkable release. However, its quality ought not to be seen as superb relative to the double album format; in just about any context, it's a monumentally powerful release. As is the case with most great albums, its strength lies in the careful plotting of both its general organization and its smaller details. It's remarkably sequenced and subtly tweaked.

Evidence supporting that claim abounds in the album's first two minutes: carefully chosen laserbeam notes shoot from the speakers in a staggered fashion until their layered sound creates a slightly modulating density of synthetic harmonies. The choice of those notes, their sustained pulse, their shaping and their eerie presence form a memory-imprinting blueprint for the rest of the album -- it will use those notes, it will rely upon artful modulations, it will lull and disturb, and, when it ends, it will leave an indelible impression.

That opening salvo of noise, above all, intimates Leaves Turn Inside You's semi-familiar otherworldliness. Spare instrumentation navigates through cryptic galaxies of milky, evanescent vocals and all but indecipherable lyrics dealing alienation and regret; cavernous percussion echoes like the explosions of far off stars, reaching you from light years away; spacy arrangements glitter with shimmering guitar stardust. And yet the songs still feel like pop songs, albeit from a dark, altered plane; they have memorable hooks and choruses, and work with familiar instruments, but to highly unique results. It's ominous, uncanny, beautiful stuff.

The discs are labeled "2" and "3", as if Unwound were intimating that we already know that disc "one" would sound like and therefore don't need it. Each disc follows a certain atmospheric vein, with "2" being the more identifiably "rock", and less unsettling, of the two. It follows relatively familiar structures and instrumentation; the synths that open the album in "We Invent You" recede to allow a brooding melody and hook to enter Unwound's cosmic stage, as cymbal splashes diffuse over a snare-smattered rhythm and synthetic, understated strings descend on the spare arrangement. "Summer Freeze" cycles through complex riffs and movements, slightly altering the note progressions of one hook to cunningly create multiple memorable guitar figures. "December" is all beautiful bass acrobatics, strange guitar chords chiming in until its steadily building 6/8 time climax splashes into riff-ruled "Treachery"'s wobbly synths. Through the end of "Off This Century", the music remains dark and complex, but very accessible.

Disc "3", on the other hand, pushes the defamiliarized rock you hear on disc "2" one step further. As a whiplash of stuttering percussion reverberates in a static sphere, a slowly growing and throbbing progression leads "One Lick Less" to its lyrical -- and the disc's thematic -- first step: "Where to land?" Unwound land in a swirling, thick plane of blistering shoegaze guitar melodies and howls filtered through an ethereal space-rock ethic. When the vocals are warped by electronic manipulation, it becomes clear that lead vocalist Justin Trosper means it when he sings, "I can't stand on the earth." Unwound are on an alien planet, full of churning, apocalyptic gusts of sound. Guitar tones reverberate off of alien glass and ice rock formations, a heavy chill descends from a beautiful million-star-lit sky with dozens of moons on the horizon. "Scarlette" unleashes its strange emotional havoc via throbbing guitars and cymbal thunderbolts and churning chords. The bizarre, martial trot of the beautiful "October All Over" thumps on a two-step drum beat to the sound of reverse-looped guitar competing with delicate minor chords, sustained shards of feedback haunting the landscape like trains of ghosts. The track proceeds gently into cavernous recesses of reverbed electronics and guitars, more complicated drum beats and manipulated vocals; then it's bent back into shape by its primary melody, only to dissipate in a morse code of effects. "Radio Gra" sounds like a troubled paean to a vacant future city, mournful strings a chilling accompaniment to foreboding vocal and guitar progressions. Finally, an swirling crash leads "Who Cares" through a grandiose climax into an unnerving cheeky '20s style horn fling, waking you from your frozen hallucination for an absurd, lackadaisical conclusion: this has all been some sort of eerie space dream, surely? No. Those last couple of minutes won't allow you to forget the strange journey you've made.

The jarring thing about Leaves Turn Inside You is that it sounds like a voyage of utter hopelessness, and yet that trip is comprised of hauntingly beautiful, melodies and arrangements. It doesn't actually need two discs -- the entire album could fit on a single, 77 minute CD -- but it's so immense in its ambition, so heavy in its emotional heft, that its division into two suites leaves the listener to decide when he or she is ready to move from the dark art-rock of disc "2" to the melancholy, totally forlorn un-familiarity of disc "3". It's likely that listeners will need a break between them -- but for all the emotional and intellectual demands that Leaves Turn Inside You imposes, it never fails to reward with lovely, aching, terrifying songs. It fulfills its deep, sinister ambition, and effortlessly erupts with arresting, cathartic moments. Terrible loneliness and complexity have never sounded -- or felt -- this good. And few albums, double or single, can hold a candle to Leaves Turn Inside You's austere magnificence.

-- Amir Karim Nezar