3 out of 5

Label: Kill Rock Stars

Produced by: Steve Fisk, Unwound

Landing right in the middle of Seattle indie and Dischord punk we have Unwound’s Fake train, 45 minutes of grungey riffs with post-punk stitching and shouty bits.  The group has their place in influential history, and from the opening ramble of Dragnalus – Witchy Poo-drummer Sara Lund’s stop/start stick work propelling forward the very DC-scratchy guitar and Justin Trosper hooting along atop it all – a lot of threads to other acts immediately begin to form, from more hard-edge Boston / Chicago stuff (the locations, chumps, not the bands) or winding back through the Up Records / KRS sound that would eventually morph into crowd-pleasing indie rock.  Second track Lucky Acid smooths the sound out but maintains the passion, well effected by Steve Fisk’s crisp production style, which generally keeps guitar work – even when heavily mired in noise and distortion like Unwound tends to like it – sounding very clear cut, appreciably amplifying the memorability of a good riff.  Trosper’s lyrics are a bit open-ended normal, but he spits them at the mix with abandon; with punk fervor.

Unfortunately, these two songs mostly cover the band’s bag of tricks, at least at this stage on the game.  The remaining tracks trade off between the two styles mentioned, occasionally leaning more heavily into one or the other, and the effect is never quite as grabbing as those first couple songs, perhaps simply by dint of their coming first.  Fake Train is still imminently listenable, and if you’ve got a lot of 90s indie post-something in your collection, Unwound notably fills a gap in the indie evolutionary timeline.  However, as the album registers as ‘good not great’ thanks to its limited palette, it similarly becomes clear why you might not hear them name-checked as often as others; even though their role as a stepping stone sound was certainly a necessary one, it’s easy to forget about the less scenic path traveled between more grabbing landmarks.