I fancy myself a pretty loud & proud Unwound fan, but I spent an unfortunate amount of time strongly disliking this record from the time I purchased it in 2001 until just recently. Not that it's that bad of a record, just that it suffers from what corporate management types refer to as "scope creep." A double album, gatefold, all black cover with "Unwound" in Gothic lettering barely visible under normal light, just a shade more black than the rest of the cover... in other words, Mssrs. Trosper and Rumsey and Mdm. Lund very obviously intended this to be a fucking epic. Perhaps they'd even envisioned it as their swan song, given that (I think) the members had agreed at this point that they would go off and do other things, get jobs, whatever. The problem is that it just doesn't live up to the epic-ness that its creators intended. There are some great songs on here, but quite a bit of tedious filler, feedback wankery, and whimsical noise that doesn't do much to bolster the album's vision or scope. The overall sound of the record is gorgeous, lush and full, each instrument well represented, no bogarting of sound anywhere to be found therein. And this sonic lushness works well for the three standout tracks ("Demons Sing Love Songs," "Off This Century," and "Look a Ghost"), but for some of the more spaced-out stuff, the effort to make it sound so good falls short. I fear, however, that my opinion of this record is clouded by the fact that I saw them live about two weeks after I bought the album, and with the exception of Sara Lund, they all looked incredibly bored onstage, almost like they'd rather be hanging curtain rods or something. It wasn't really a calculated aloofness, more of a "can we please get this overwith?" type of vibe coming off the stage, most notably when they rolled through this new stuff. But more recently, I've added this album to my commuting playlist and, with the longer attention span that I now have as an older man, I find myself in awe of the three tracks mentioned above, and far less impatient with the spacy stuff. I still think they fell short of the scope they were going for, but "Leaves Turn Inside You" has, for me, endured well the three years since its release.