Started with this, as i hadna hoid it:



And then it led to this, for the same reason:



I had heard the Flying Lotus stuff, but not this. It is kind of awesome.

Researching bands who are playing at Reading, hope I catch these guys when I'm there

I was just going to comment on the general fineness of that as a band name, and then as i searched it i discovered who dunnit. A bit different from him. Interesting.

Too bad about youtube compression, sounds like some interesting things going on underneath all of that scvwisshle.

Yeah, the Youtube compression is obviously buggering up what should be a fine and interesting sounding recording. Some nifty guitar noises happening here. It's more on the postpunky side rather than noise rawk. I'm enjoying it, for whatever it's worth.

Yarr, a definite "otherflavour" from most of the other things i have heard from him in his various other bands.

A recurrent chaotic badly-mixed thing in here that i don't hate. His other bands tend to be noisy, but almost clinically precise at it, to my ears. Some of this is just a cacophonous mess. I like that.

Additionally there seems to be an awful lot of surf-grade reverbguitar.

I can diggit.

Fell off the back of a truck alongside the Jersey Turnpike of the intarwebs, or something. My apologies- there's apparently not a smaller version of the cover art?

I should mention, re: the above, it's not a metal record at all. It's full-on '70s-style prog rock. The... Single? that was released, Cusp Of Eternity, with its rhythmic guitar chunking is the closest thing to metal on the record. Overall, very Hammond- and string-heavy, drums are dry as a bone. Guitar tone is pretty much classic Marshall when it's not an acoustic. Lots of layered vocals. Dude can sing, and well. It is, I suppose, not as laid-back as Heritage was, and I think the production's a bit better this time around. It does sound very good. I suppose there's no need for me to comment on the instrumental performances. These guys are very, very chops-y, but the fetish for classic old-school tones makes that sort of thing bearable to my ears.

Oddly enough, they might be less accessible as a straight-up prog rock band than they were as a death metal band, from a writing standpoint. This is more formless, free-flowing and jammy. The metal stuff was more structured and riff-oriented. There's few riffs and little repetition here. I don't know if there's anything here for the metal crowd besides the fact they tear it the fuck up on their instruments.

I'm getting really stuck into Mastodons Once More Round The Sun. Its hardly left my cars CD player except to make room for Crack The Skye fuggin brilliant albums.

Revisiting, still swell.

Listening to this for the sake of taking another shot at understanding why people consider it so important. And it's just not doing a goddamn thing for me. I feel like it's not even a matter of me "not getting it", there just isn't much happening, IMO.

Granted, I know there are some fans of it on here. Not trying to rock the boat, this is just sort of a perplexing case to me.

My main take is: these ideas are not that new? Drive Like Jehu and Fugazi had already done more than half of this shit years and years prior besides resorting to things that could be arguably dismissed as gimmicks.

I don't consider it something new(especially because of how they took their covers and liner notes (and some of their music ideas, i think moreso than from fugazi) straight out of the Nation Of Ulysses library of influences and source materials) but i think that is a great rock record.

At the time, i liked the bits of electronics that didn't ever quite get into the way of the rock band elements. I was looking back then to mix some elements like that, and though i didn't think they fully succeeded in it, i liked that they were playing with it then.

The drums are fantastic. This and the record before are great examples, imo, of not being tied to what kind of beat might be expected, and also of not being too tied to what is physically possible(the record before has some very obvious four-to-eight arm overdubs, this one a bit less, but they do pop up from spot to spot.) I dug that a lot also back then.

And i am pretty well into the style of guitar there. Stop and go stuff, a mix of powerchords and dissonant skronk. I like the way the two guitars play off each other as well. Ulyssess, Fugazi, Jehu, whoever, sure did a lot of it first, but even then, i always wished that it had been more popular the first time around, because aside from them, not many other bands got into that sort of sound. I have never had a problem with a band borrowing that sort of sound/concepts. I would love it if there were more bands like Fugazi out there. (this is a nuance thing though, not bands that play what sound like fugazi songs, but bands that write music in the vein of what fugazi played with for sounds and ideas.)

To me, Refused were a band who was heavily influenced by what they liked(their first record is basically straight up youthcrew/straightedge style hardcore; it wasn't until their second one that they started to do their some of own sorts of things) but that doesn't, for me anyhow, at all affect how i view this record.

Though, also, if i dismissed everything i heard that sounded like something i had heard before, i wouldn't listen to anything at all ever. EVERYTHING new i hear sounds like it was ripped off from something else i know/like, and not just, as i hear Refused, influenced heavily by, but actually songs/riffs/sounds learned and fucking straight up copied. In this, at least the Refused kind of played around with it a little more than that, and for sure, at least they chose a sound/aesthetic that was never all that popular the first time around(it is far more popular now actually, then it was before.)

[On that, it is worth noting that even the fugazi legend has continued to grow, since they broke up. They were always a "good band", but now they seem to be widely considered to be something much better/bigger than that. When this(Shape Of Punk To Come) record came out Fugazi were still mostly just considered a good band(only a relative few considered them to be amazing/great). End Hits was the current record when this came out, and 13 Songs (or alternately In On The Kill Taker) was still widely considered to be the best of their records(though i still was all Red Medicine back then, not that many agreed)). The Argument didn't exist yet, and not everyone thought that they were headed in the right direction at that point, just that they were a good band. But certainly, they did not have anywhere near the universal approval/worship that they now possess. So, from my perspective, anyhow, a band like Refused, actually wanting to take some of the sounds and run with them, was definitely a welcome development.]

My main reason for bringing up the fact that a lot of the ideas are not incredibly new is that that seems to be the focal point of a lot of it's praise that I have heard. I don't know why I expressed my feelings about this, though. I am in Alaska and am thusly in an asshole-ish mood. BUT, I am Anchorage and can hang with Alex and that is sick, that however is another conversation.


It is funny though, the more I think about it the more I realize that I would probably be more into this record if it had sassy vocals/more of what I consider a good screaming vocal. The vocals have this sound to them that leads me to believe their vocalist isn't actually very loud at all.

Well, that is just cus kids are dumb. For a lot of kids, the fact that Fugazi, Ulyssess, Jehu, ect, were not actually all that popular to a mass audience in their day, meant that Refused was probably their first exposure to this sort of sound. Even after hearing the stuff that came first, it can be hard to convince the brain that the first thing you heard wasn't the first one to do it. The degree of praise applied to this record is definitely over the top, and mostly dumbkid-driven. It is still, to me, a good record though.



i like discussing/arguing rock with folks who like sounds.







I forget where but i seem to recall hearing him unaccompanied, and while it is definitely a bit of a vocal affectation, he did not seem as quiet as i have heard some folks. Listening to his voice though, i do get the feeling that he could probably do that all day everyday and not lose his voice. As functional as that is as a skill/ability, it does tend to make me think a little less of a shouter, if they don't seem to be hurting themselves doing it. That however, i freely admit is just me being wrong about things.