Anyone who wants to understand what Unwound is about need look no further than "Dragnalus," the opening track off their first album, Fake Train. In it, a seductive two-note riff crystallizes over a bubbly groove while the vocals veer from deadpan boredom to teeth-gritting screaming. Sound familiar? Well, it ought to be; I'm dead serious when I say that "Dragnalus" is Unwound's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." To use rather ham-handed comparisons, Fake Train married Sonic Youth's guitar squall with Nirvana's abyss-staring and ended up with the New Punk Sound, which retained the dark churn of grunge while doing away with the Black Sabbath undertones. New Plastic Ideas, far and away Unwound's best album, was full of dramatic grooves and textbook punk dogma, evoking teenage alienation and loneliness like no other album since... well, not even Nirvana could top it.

On subsequent albums, Unwound began moving further into math-rock territory, peppering their songs with wiry, dissonant riffs and splintering their huge messy chords into radar-blip chunks. Their concerns and imagery focused on the impersonalization of humanity through technology, and their music slowly changed to reflect that-- repetitive, robotic guitar parts, declamatory vocals, and a colder, more sterile sound. Challenge For A Civilized Society attempts to continue these trends, but on the whole, it sounds like Unwound isn't up to the task.

While Unwound has always drifted on the self- indulgent side of artistic exploration, they've never let it bog down the overall feel of an album. Stuck in the middle of New Plastic Ideas, the ten-minute instrumental "Abstraktions" made for an excellent centerpiece; "Sonata For Loudspeakers" doesn't do the same for Challenge because there aren't enough good songs on either side to support it. The artistic self-indulgence has spread to all the tracks on Challenge, and while the results might have been intended as hypnotic, they've instead turned out dull. Only "Laugh Track" and "Meet The Plastics" retain any energy, with the angular, off-kilter riffs that made previous albums like Repetition so catchy.

It seems like the more Unwound tries to say, the less I want to listen; "The World Is Flat," "Lifetime Achievement Award" and "What Went Wrong" do little more than drag their heels for longer than they really need to. In stark contrast, "No Tech," a garbled, twisted new-wave track that they get right clocks in under two minutes. It's good to know Unwound hasn't completely forgotten the virtue of brevity, although on Challenge For A Civilized Society it clearly slipped their minds more than once.

-Nick Mirov