While the genre already boasted a large and very enthusiastic fan base at the time, there weren't many fans who wouldn't begrudgingly admit that punk rock had been played by 1998. By then, the genre was already steeped in around three decades' worth of history (give or take, depending on what a listener calls the “first” punk record) and had already undergone several stylistic overhauls and modifications; The Stooges lit the fuse before Patti Smith, The Ramones and The Clash (among others) set up some landmarks around which the sonic map started getting charted and hardcore distilled the music down to its' basic elements and base emotions in the Eighties before emo blanched it to make it palatable to the mainstream, and that timeline doesn't even include the revivals and renaissances orchestrated by bands including Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring. By 1998, punk had been well- and long-since absorbed into the pop culture vernacular, but it had lost some important threads in its' fabric as well; one scan of the genre shows that much of the music had been homogenized into a single specific sound. Somehow punk – which started out as an artistic and creative free-for-all – had begun to organize and adhere to rules and values for what was valid and what was not. It sounds funny now but, in 1998, if you knew how to play three or four chords and had some rough experiences to relate about a girl , you too could be in a punk band and produce a hit record. It sounds like an odd form of heresy to say it, but punk rock and its' myriad sub-genres were in very real danger of becoming formulaic without even realizing it. It would likely have happened too – had The Refused not literally come out of nowhere (or Sweden) and released an album that not only reinvigorated punk, but gave many of those aforementioned sub-genres new fuel and new ideas to contemplate.
In retrospect, the title of The Refused's third (and final) album is both true and prophetic – The Shape Of Punk To Come housed an all-new paradigm of guiding principles and practices for composition, production, performance, style and form for punks to digest but, even twelve years on, first-time listeners will wonder if they're listening to a punk record because the form is still very raw; bits of it are recognizable on other records released since, but they're still very untested here, and pure. From the opening dialogue of “Worms of the senses/Faculties of the skull,” The Refused paint a slightly different picture of punk music and the genre's mindset as the words:
“They told me that a classic's never got a style but they do – they do. Somehow baby, I never thought that we'd do too.”
The sentiment of “Worms of the senses/Faculties of the skull”is dramatic and almost forlorn and contemplative – none of which was particularly foreign to punk at that time – but the dry tone of singer Dennis Lyxzen's voice totally bucks the tradition of poppy vacuity that most of punk rock was upholding in 1998. In '98 of course, punks were already used to both Tim and Billie Joe Armstrong being pregnant with emotion and plain in that emotion's aim but nothing is so cut and dry here, and the plot only thickens when the Refused smashes listeners over the head with strains of hardcore brutality more aggressive and believable than anything which had been heard in the genre before; it is unhinged. While Lyxzen's vocals do bounce back and forth between spoken and screamed passages (fairly de rigeur since the days of Black Flag), the music behind him breaks and reconstitutes in different forms that borrow from all different corners of the aggressive rock spectrum including (but not limited to) the groovy, textural, guitar-driven funk of Rage Against The Machine and bits of techno-aggro-rock that foreshadow Limp Bizkit. All of those sounds play out through “Worms of the senses/Faculties of the skull” while the band simultaneously holds true to its' hardcore center (when Lyxzen howls, “I've got a bone to pick,” it is the greatest hardcore moment put to tape in ten years), the effect of which leaves the heads of listeners spinning.
After the first blitz of “Worms of the senses…,” The Refused change gears into the more tense but less aggravated “Liberation Frequency” and don't even sound like the same band. At first, power chords get abandoned completely in favor of some jazzy, suspended seventh vamps before smashing listeners over the head again in the chorus and leaving them hanging on the ropes. “Liberation Frequency” plays like an enactment of the Living Theater as the band all but vacates the mix and leaves Lyxzen screaming for change by himself before brutalizing him again just because they can. It's a violent turn that sees The Refused definitely imposing their will, but it's also deranged enough to leave listeners confused at where the band is headed.
And then they break off again for another jazzy fill! The design of The Shape Of Punk To Come continues to confound and function quite unlike anything else in rock (of any kind) because, while other records seek to build momentum to reach a pinnacle, TSOPTC plays more like a radio programme; it breaks and resumes, resumes in augmented forms and utilizes a multitude of generic cliches to develop an impression and image rather than a single statement. That impression and the methodology used to create it might not be so fantastic had it been done with samples, but everything listeners hear on The Shape Of Punk To Come was performed specifically for this record; when listeners hear a stand-up bass part in “The deadly rythm,” it was made by Jakob Munck for that song alone and the effect is exactly what one might expect from such ambitious construction – The Shape Of Punk To Come sprawls out of stereo speakers and totally defies classification because it uses so many different sounds and uses punk as the mortar to assemble it all into a cohesive whole; tubular bells, electronics and other unusual (for punk) sounds bleed through “Bruitist Pome #5,” “New Noise,” “Refused are fuckin' dead” and the title track but, each time, the proceedings always venture back to the root, thereby solidifying the amalgam. Because of that design, the band's punk side suddenly becomes flexible and vibrant as the other sounds that pass through the Shape Of Punk To Come framework and the whole thing comes off as both scattered and enriching; because the record was the first of its' kind, there are bugs to be worked out, of course, but the incredible thing is that some of those bugs would go on to be as formative a set of sounds for some bands (somehow, there are moments here that also call to mind the pressed and clean punk of Fall Out Boy – somehow, it feels like “This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race” couldn't have existed without “The Refused Party program” and “Refused are fuckin dead”) as much as the staple songwriting of The Refused would go on to reshape hardcore (check out Comeback Kid's entire catalogue for a glimpse at how influential The Refused have been).
Of course, as happens with so many other punk bands after they release truly groundbreaking work, The Refused didn't last long after The Shape Of Punk To Come was released; the album came out on October 27, 1998 and the band had called it quits before the end of that year. Even so, the record didn't dissolve into obscurity – in the twelve years since its' release, elements of the album haven't so much manifest directly in particular bands as generally coloring hardcore as a whole; because the band was capable of being so aggressive and unhinged, the harder end of hardcore is the obvious place to look for bands who were paying attention to Refused but, really, even bands on the poppier end of the spectrum have begun showing flecks of Refused influence – albeit a more polished and blanched form. For punk bands, is that the measure of how influential “the important names” can be? Maybe, but it's more likely that the true measure of a punk band's influence is close to impossible because everybody in the scene knows when something's good, so everybody takes a piece for themselves. That has certainly proven to be the case with The Shape Of Punk To Come; twelve years later, pieces of the album can be found everywhere, whether it was intentional or not. That diffuse recognition may just make The Shape Of Punk To Come one of the most influential hardcore albums of all time; not because it's easy to pick out of a sound, but that it's just everywhere and impossible to pin down precisely.
Artist:
www.officialrefused.com/
Album:
The Shape Of Punk To Come deluxe reissue is available now. Buy it here on Amazon .
