Unwound
New Plastic Ideas

One racks their brain to arrive at an improbable solution, which is categorically not the correct one.
The fear of the nineties, in hindsight, turns out to be fertile dung for ALL the musical directions that still exist today. The nineties are, for many (all?) of us, the corner and tombstone of rock guitarism and its derivatives, the quintessence of the dull and sparkling virtuality of the eighties.
We can sit here with a glass of Pimm's and Ginger Ale and some caramel popcorn and glorify grunge or melodic hardcore, post-hardcore or post-rock, or sweeten ourselves up (like the combination I'm ingesting) between brit-pop, shoegaze, and baggy; I doubt it and in the end, you will agree with me.

In the first half of the nineties, the world was focused on alternative rock with roots in noise rock and hardcore punk, savoring the values of post-hardcore without excessively developing towards that post-rock that had recently been approaching Touch & Go (ironic). From this stardust emerged invisibly like meteors, Unwound. It's strange to talk about them since Trosper's band hailed from Tumwater in the state of Washington, just a few kilometers from Seattle, and in their work, it wasn't blasphemous to utter the word: grunge, yet they remained on the fringes of history; even the Smashing Pumpkins were labeled in that genre. Even Bush. And Radiohead. Injustice and insults.

So after assimilating the hardcore punk of Slint, Unwound took the reins and evolved it towards a noise rock straddling the viscous experience of Sonic Youth and the seismic croak of Jesus Lizard, absorbing and making their own the artful aspirations of the American (Mission Of Burma) and English (Gang Of Four) post-punk, in the process (in my imagination) joining Fugazi and far surpassing the more indie, Polvo; a post-everything, so multifaceted, that has never had equals.

New Plastic Ideas is not the best album, not the worst, not the most engaging or emotional, only because all of Unwound's albums are a pinnacle for the careers of all bands embarking on a hardcore path. New Plastic Ideas manages to balance the schizophrenia that permanently lives within this band: What Was Found is a filthy and violent hardcore punk that doubles in intensity with sudden explosions, Hexezsene recovers the post-hardcore of Rites Of Spring and Squirrel Bait and minimizes it to the contemporary wave of emo-bands giving it an enviable intensity, All Souls Day is one of the best tracks from Action Park by Shellac released 7 months later; but the high point remains and will remain for eternity the instrumental Abstraktions, a powerful mini-suite between Slint (and Rodan) and the raw slowcore of Codeine.

Subsequently, Unwound would conclude their musical journey with Leaves Turn Inside You in 2001, a perfect manual of the punker turned progger, leaving a legacy that no one has really taken up yet, and I will still be here seated, skeletal and dusty, if I truly know this world.