https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o14i_8XGoAs
My first countdown playlist has been assembled, so my second begins here. While I flagrantly ignore Rob Fleming's mixtape rules from High Fidelity -- I'm at least as fond of a slow buildup as of a "corker", even before we deal with his "you can't have white music and black music together" -- I'm not sure I've started many mixes more stylishly than with Refused's Dennis Lyxzen reciting ominous poetry at the bottom of his range, in two simultaneous vocal takes a small fraction of a second separated, over what beatboxing sounds like when steam pumps do the breathing and keep their mouths open. The tightly synchronized drum and bass that enter could be saboteurs breaking into the factory, but trying carefully not to miss a word while doing so. We're 40 seconds in when the guitar starts, a tightly coiled riff that momentarily tricks me into thinking it's tugged along a small brass section or a large platoon of insects; fittingly, it cuts the oration off right before Lyxzen's final word. He starts howling in the close vicinity of notes, and we have a song.
An elegant song, actually, for being so fierce and loud.
Guitars are staccato, leaving space between notes; synthesizers warp and wobble in ways linked as closely to hip-hop as rock. A couplet that doesn't imply subtlety ("I'm all out of appeals now/ I'm just going to scream now") is sung softly and melodically, the eye of a storm in which New Order have, for just a few seconds longer, forgotten a past as a panzer division. Fugazi's abrasive, cryptic minimalism appears to be a potent influence, and Faith No More's clomping white-boy funkiness (including Roddy Bottom's electronics), and Rage Against the Machine's fusion of activism, heavy metal, and divebombing.
"Old Friends, New War" is track two on Freedom: Refused's first album of the 21st century, and their first on which Lyxzen restrained himself from the ear-shattering screams that had previously put them in the category of "I want to like them, but I also want to avoid permanent hearing damage". I just realized now that Freedom was produced by Nick Launay, whose catalog, as far back as his 1980s work for Midnight Oil (10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 and Red Sails in the Sunset), has been consistently marked by a devotion to inspired little details that reward repeat listens, and to sculpting beauty from ugliness.
Refused would want me to notice their words. Style doesn't require it, honestly; Lyxzen's recited opening would sound plenty apt just intoning mysterious magical spells ("We and our li-cen-sors re-main the sole/ owner of all right,/ ti-tle and in-ter-est in the Services/ and Software. We re-serve all rights not gran-ted HERE!"). But the actual content is better. "I clutch the worn-out year of my birth/ herded with the herd./ I whisper through anemic lips: I was born/ and the centuries surround me with FIRE". It's a song about caring about a world with too many moving parts to care back. It's a song about trying to draw patterns before they shrink from view: "Commit to memory failures past... Not dumb enough to close my mind". It's a song about being "Stuck in an uneven fight", but not finding it acceptable to quit.
Refused live in social-democratic Sweden, where a punk band can get its reunion album funded in part by a prize from the Ministry of Trade, and devote its acceptance speech to celebrating the nation's Workers' Educational Association and youth centers. But Sweden's elite didn't accept labor unions or universal health care without a fight either, and as its white nationalist party rises in the polls, the fight is hardly over. As Lyxzen pledges to be "the weakest link in every chain", he's almost certainly not picturing Anne Droid, on Satellite 5, telling Rose's fellow contestants "You are the weakest link" in a monotone too bored to be truly robotic, then shooting them with disintegrator rays. But the Doctor and Rose and Jack also knew, even under fire, the power of refusing to play the game properly when its owners are too large and too self-interested.
They, admittedly, had the advantage of being in both Doctor Who's world and Doctor Who's opening credits, which we and Refused do not. Refused, instead, have drums and bass and guitars and synthesizers and words. You use the tools you have.
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