#400: Refused, "Old Friends, New War" (2015)

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.

#411: Queensryche, "Revolution Calling" (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdOsL4Xe7Q

In high school, tales of dystopia are oddly thrilling. We're shown a dictatorial world in which teens are forced to memorize official fictions and have few choices over the content of their lives, and we get to pretend this is escapist fiction, full of heroic resistance, instead of our daily routine. (I suspect dystopia becomes a more and more attractive theme the more assigned homework a given student completes.) These days dystopias dominate Young Adult novels (the Hunger Games and Divergent and the Giver and Chaos Walking and Maze Runner series, and on, and on), and get turned into hit movies as often as not. In 1988, we mostly just had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell -- winning us over through sheer persuasive brilliance in the absence of targeted marketing. Joined, occasionally, by a rock band taking inspiration from them.

#412: Savatage, "the Wake of Magellan" (1998)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k1TMhUxEgY

Switching from Joan Armatrading's unpredictable piano rhythms and soft washes of guitar to Jon Oliva's unpredictable piano rhythms and Chris Caffery's soft washes of guitar, we transition smoothly from jazz-pop to heavy metal.

I sometimes explain my musical tastes to myself (rightly or wrongly) as a logical consequence of my growing-up environment.