No Energy is a compilation box set by the band Unwound. Review by Sam Hockley-Smith: No Energy is essential even without that information. Listening to these box sets in order (don’t do it all at once), Unwound’s growth is clear: they moved from scrappy punk band with interesting ideas to a musically precise machine, harnessing feedback squalls, goopy drums, and guitars that sounded like they were repeatedly bashed against a brick wall, in an effort to approach dark transcendental bliss through repetition and coiled tension. In the liner notes for No Energy, drummer Sara Lund writes, “We learned to communicate absolutely with our instruments, and while we were playing together, all personal tensions were erased. This band played with intention, never intending anything specific beyond honest expression.” If you think about Unwound from this angle, the band is cast in a spiritual light, and it makes sense. So much of the music here, from “Natural Disasters” to “Disappoint” to the fuzzed out tonal scrape of “Vern’s Answer to the Masses”, is head-spinning and angry, but very deeply so. Like Lund, bassist Vern Rumsey, and guitarist/singer Justin Trosper had made peace with whatever was roiling inside them by obsessively pushing it outward. You can hear it on “Corpse Pose”, presented here in two forms, and as close to a signature Unwound song as you’re going to get. A walking bassline is almost immediately cut through with stabs of guitar that sound like what would happen if g