by Esin Nisan Yildirim (@esinnisann)
Twenty-five years ago, Unwound left behind Leaves Turn Inside You, a defining record of experimental rock and post-rock, one that still echoes through the genres today, newly remastered and reissued once more by Numero Group. How many albums, in your lifetime, keep giving you a new sound to catch with every listen? Usually, after a couple of plays, you remember an album, you can call it up, hum it back. With Leaves Turn Inside You, you know you've heard it before, but something subconscious erases the specifics each time, so every listen plays out like a different experience. The songs seem to alter with each pass, getting into a kind of chemical reaction with one another. How many albums create a feeling through their title alone? Leaves Turn Inside You is already a sensational image before a single note plays. The first time you hear the title, it's possible to stop and just feel it, to know something about it immediately, no thinking involved. It would be good to hear your first feeling, not thought, when you first hear Leaves Turn Inside You.
Just like Justin Trosper said in an interview about the album, "It was supposed to be psychedelic without being psychedelic. The whole lyrical approach was derived from things I wrote in dream journals." That feeling is hard to miss. The album feels like dreaming and going deeper into the dream, where there's no clear sense of when you arrived or where you're going. It feels like it hasn't even started, yet it's always there, and every time you pay attention to it, it pulls you further in. With each listen, it becomes denser, until the whole record starts to feel like one continuous state rather than a collection of separate tracks.
Fourteen tracks, a dream (or multiple dreams), an experiment with no rules.There's almost no limit to what can be said about it. The lyrics follow the same dream logic, constantly shifting between images, feelings and ideas. The opening track, "We Invent You," starts like the ending of a movie: a guitar and a voice arriving mid-scene, as Trosper sings, "Save your grace, I'm inventing you." Sara Lund’s drums throughout are unpredictable, and everything else follows that same restless, dynamic unpredictability, but there's still a vulnerability underneath it all.
From there, "Look a Ghost" opens with Vern Rumsey’s hard hitting bass and doesn't let up. In "December," Trosper sings, "We held our lives / By the whims that govern conversations." Then, on "Terminus," he suddenly gives you something completely different: "Hold me, I'm a gun, six shots and I'll be gone." And on "Off This Century," everything turns outward: "Everything is a commercial / We advertise our memories / We leave our shit on silver platters / And then buy whatever is left." It's impossible to settle into one way of reading the album, because the next moment it has already changed shape. After 25 years, it still surprises, it still makes you feel something, and the listening experience remains entirely its own.