Unwinding from Unwound: Survival Knife Is Here to Barf Riff-Rock in Your Face

From 1991 to 2001, Olympia, WA. trio Unwound were the post-hardcore shit, bludgeoning their way through the underground with the mightiest of noise-infested, screamoid records like Repetition and Fake Train, nonstop touring, and deep DIY roots. Ultimately, Unwound imploded on their ’01 tour supporting the shoe-gaze-warped, dreamy art-punk masterpiece Leaves Turn Inside You, never to be heard from again.

That was until about 2010-ish when drummer Sara Lund surfaced in ex-Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker Band while singer/guitarist Justin Trosper was found singing the praises of sludge-metal titans KARP in the awesome documentary Kill All Redneck Pricks. Meanwhile, bassist Vern Rumsey is still keeping a low profile.

Then Unwound returned, sort of. No, they didn’t jump on the reunion train but instead launched the Unwound Archive, self-released Live Leaves (a document of live-in-concert cuts culled their final tour) and hooked up with the Numero Group label for the recent reissue onslaught of their seminal back catalog.

But what about Trosper? For the decade after Unwound’s demise, he retired his guitar, enrolled in school, and only popped up in that KARP doc. Now his musical sabbatical is over. Trosper has once again joined forces with original Unwound drummer, longtime bud Brandt Sandeno (who later returned for Leaves and its ill-fated tour), and along with Olympia locals bassist Meg and drummer Kris Cunningham, have formed the epically scorching, riff-rock behemoth, Survival Knife.

After busting out onto the scene with a steamrolling Sub Pop seven-inch and a homecoming single on Kill Rock Stars, Survival Knife has since hooked up with Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock’s Glacial Pace label. On its just-dropped debut long-player Loose Power, the band has naturally set its rhythms to ’90s-era angular with a Television-on-speed, dueling guitar-assault; its extra taut, hook-heavy, anthemic bruisers dripping riffs galore that would make your silly head spin. Noisey caught Trosper at home in Washington to talk about Survival Knife’s serious barrage of licks and what rock he’s been hiding under all these years.

Noisey: From when Unwound broke up in 2002 to Survival Knife and Numero Group’s Unwound reissues, where the hell did you go? Did you stop playing music completely?
Justin Trosper: Um, kinda. I wasn’t in a band and didn’t play any shows for ten years. Unwound had built that studio that we recorded the last Leave Turn Inside You in. That (studio) was in my house, so at that time I started recording bands from Olympia there and did a handful of records. I was playing (around) with the idea of engineering. I just really wasn’t in the right place in my life for that, I guess (laughing), or maybe I just realized like “Eh, ya know, I do like recording and engineering, but…” I am getting back into it right now but I decided I needed to get back into music.

But was it a conscious decision for you to get away from playing music, stop playing guitar completely and focus on studio work after Unwound was done?
For a while, yeah. I had moved to the Los Angeles area, sold a bunch of my recording stuff and did a couple of recording projects with this guy Slater Bradley, who’s a video artist who I’m friends with—he did one of the videos that was on the Leaves Turn Inside You CD. I did a couple of projects with him and I started going to school.

I remember seeing you surface in that awesome KARP documentary and wondered “Where did that dude disappear to?”
[Laughs.] Yeah, I was just pursuing other stuff. I was so full on music from basically high school until Unwound broke up. That was full speed ahead for ten years and I didn’t do really anything else. So I was basically like “Let me go to school and learn about things besides music.” That was the main focus of my life for a few years.

You don’t still live in L.A. now, right?
No, I moved back up to Washington.

Then you hooked up with your old Unwound friend Brandt Sandeno again to start doing another band again? How did that work out?
Me and him have always been in touch and talking about stuff. We were talking about songwriting when he said, “Maybe you should play guitar again.” During Unwound, we had a band called Replikants and a couple of other bands. But Repilkants were this band that was this “anything goes” project. We did everything from extreme noise to new age [laughs] to keyboard music.

I remember Replikants having a record.
We actually had two that came out on 5RC, which, was the Kill Rock Stars, I guess, experimental label, for lack of a better word. A couple of times in Replikants, we did two-guitar stuff together and we always had fun with it, so we decided to try it. We used to do John Fahey-style, instrumental guitar-type stuff. Then we were like “Well, let’s try to do this in a rock band with two guitarists.” Brandt had already been playing with Kris and Meg a little bit in a couple of different projects so it was like “Well, let’s see if we can combine these two different things together.” That’s sorta how it worked.

Was it pure coincidence that Survival Knife started when the Unwound Archive site, the Live Leaves record and the reissues sprouted up?
Yeah, it’s pretty coincidental but it did feed an energy into it for me. But, it wasn’t like “Okay, I’m gonna make a big comeback! Let’s see. I’ll get all this stuff going.” The Unwound stuff started happening, we started a website and that got the snowball rolling or whatever downhill and it picked up all this speed and turned into this whole thing that it’s become now. I think that maybe in a way it encouraged me to be more involved.

And make your grand entrance back into the indie world.
Right, yeah, yeah. It’s a little bit of a different world so I’ve been learning.

It must be a bit of a culture shock since you’ve been pretty much been out of being in a band for a decade.
It was the beginning of that back then [when Unwound broke up]. I was thinking about this the other day. We were talking about the last record—the last Unwound record—and how we were in 2001 or 2002 thinking. That was when Napster was around and that stuff was happening where music theft was getting in full swing and a lot of people at labels and in bands were wondering what was going to happen. [Laughs.] And the inevitable happened with whatever situation it is now. I’m just trying to figure it out. I’ve asked people that have stayed around the last 20 years and everybody seems to be like “Yeah, it’s a mystery. We don’t really know how everybody’s going to survive and how things are going to change” because the change is so rapid and it’s only the technologists who understand it. [Laughs.]

Everybody else is always playing catch up. Then, all of a sudden, there’s some new, weird, corporate, venture-capitalist thing like Spotify that pops up and it becomes dominant then it goes away and something else comes. It’s very hard to grasp and if you’re not in tune. In some ways, it’s still exactly the same. It’s like “Well, you play shows, people come to the shows.” There are certain things that are essentially the same and the other stuff is a mystery. You gotta do a little bit of social media, or not. It depends on the scale of what you’re interested in. I’m just trying to do the basic thing like, “Here’s the record. I hope people who want to hear it can hear it.”

You’ve been out of music for so long but Survival Knife has been embraced quickly. You’ve played some big shows opening for Modest Mouse and Obits and others before you even had a record out.
The Modest Mouse [shows were in] theaters and those were pretty fun. I hadn’t done that for a long time—I hadn’t even played very many normal shows for a long time.

How was it playing live again after so many years out of action?
I think, maybe, the first show, it seemed like “Oh, yeah. Okay…” I had done it so much and it was like the whole “riding a bike” thing.

Did playing live again stir up any negativity? That last Unwound tour is well-documented as being pretty difficult.
Not really. There’s been a lot of time since then and it’s nice to compartmentalize it in one little part of my brain. For the rest of my life, I’ll probably still have the same struggles in music: the same kind of problems with performance or remembering lyrics—those kind of things that are just the way my brain is. There are some of those things that are like “Oh, yeah.” I’ve noticed some things I’m better at dealing with now that I’m older. [Laughs.] With Unwound, we started out so young and we learned along the way. It took us a few years before we considered ourselves some sort of professional-type thing, like, “Oh, we should show up on time; we should do sound check; we should actually tune our instruments!” That really wasn’t too big of a consideration for us—things we made fun of people for like “That’s what music store people do.” But now people are so much more pro—it seems more systemized or careerist. I’m not really criticizing, per se. It’s just something that was definitely uncommon in the early ’90s but it became more common and we were more like that later on. So now, it’s okay. It feels more normal for me to do that because I’ve spent a lot more time doing straight world work. [Laughs.]

So the music world is way more pro now and you are acclimating.
[Laughs.] Yeah, in a way. To me, it’s more about being efficient. At the end of the day, I want to play music and do it better, you know? Not that I regret anything Unwound did but I can become a better guitar player, I can become better at performing and I can become better at recording.

Loose Power is a sick name for a record.
It felt right. We were trying to think of a title that wasn’t one of the songs and Brandt kept saying that Loose Power is the best title for the record. It’s sort of a cross between Loose Nut and Raw Power.

Black Flag and The Stooges. It doesn’t get any better than that. That’s a good reference point. I’m using that, for sure.
[Laughs.] It’s hard for me to be really objective about some of the feedback I’ve heard from people who are like “Well, it definitely has a little bit of an Unwound thing but it’s a lot more like… rock.” Well, I thought Unwound was pretty rock, but it was definitely more loosey goosey and crazy, or whatever Unwound was.

It sounds sharper than Unwound, too.
Well, having the two-guitar thing is…with Unwound, the melody/harmony type thing was between the bass and guitar—it wasn’t overtones exactly— but these sort of overtones would happen between those two instruments. With this band, definitely, the harmony/melody, harmalodic—whatever you want to say it thing—is this two-guitar thing more.

Is it easier for you being in a two-guitar band to go out there and do your own thing?
Well, I thought it would be actually easier for me (laughing) to sing and play guitar but this is actually more difficult—the songs are no less easy. It’s like a Television type thing what we’re doing—just a lot of interplay. Say, I’ll come up with a part and Brandt will be like “That’s a little bit too much this way or it needs to be less busy” or something. I tend to come up with pretty busy type melodies.

So you got a Tom Verlaine/Richard Lloyd thing going.
(Laughing) Exactly. That’s what we hope. Brandt is more like a “hold-back guy” and I’m kinda like “barf it out.”

Brad Cohan is always barfing.

—

WANT MORE?

Black Anvil Are Heavily Armed Just Waiting for You to Talk Shit

Even Ace Frehley Thinks KISS Is a Circus

Listen to an Unreleased Unwound Track, and Read Our In-Depth Interview