Unwound
"Corpse Pose" b/w "Everything Is Weird" (Kill Rock Stars)
See the review of "Repetition" elsewhere in this issue. If you feel the need, clip it out and paste it here. This fucking rules.
"Repetition" CD (Kill Rock Stars)
Angular, grinding punk which cuts through the noise with all the grace of a sledge hammer used as a filet knife. This isn't delicate music, nor is it for people who have delicate sensibilities or fragile constitutions. Those who are faint of heart or hearing shouldn't listen to this, simply because the noise, the reconstructions of pop and punk Unwound engages in, are likely to rend and shred eardrums of the uninitiated, tearing them apart. Maybe this is anesthesia, maybe it's some odd narcotic designed to make people feel sensations and emotions more intensely. Maybe it's just a band trying to strip what they think down to the absolute essential, leaving their ideas unadorned by sonic fripperies and doodads. And what magnificent ideas they are! Lines like "The drawback to living is finding yourself" and "Goodbye to all the ones who left to yourself to be invisible and seem impossible" casually lean on lampposts in these songs, heckling passersby and smoking cigarettes. I may not be able to decode the meanings implicit in these words yet, but I'm sure this utterly rocks.