Saturday, April 14, 2012

Refused Are Fucking Dead No More

Last night I saw Refused at Coachella. More accurately, I watched the live stream of them playing at Coachella. Either way, I wasn't able to sleep, it was 2:30am and I came across an article on Punknews reporting that Coachella would be streaming certain acts all weekend.. including Refused at 2:20am that night.

Of course I immediately opened the stream.

A little background information: I was only 10 when Refused released The Shape of Punk to Come. I was still a full year and a half away from actually listening to music on my own, and two years away from listening to anything that could even be remotely described as "punk" (no matter how mainstream it might have been). So Refused weren't exactly a group that broke my heart by disbanding. And even when I did finally hear about them (I believe it was around 2002-2003ish),  it wasn't exactly my cup of tea. At the time, I was just discovering punk bands outside of the Ramones, so if it wasn't something that was loudly shouted and finished after 90 seconds, I didn't care much for it. Sure I liked New Noise and Liberation Frequency, but overall I just wasn't mentally prepared for something so experimental and different- even if it was rooted in the same stuff that I loved (I felt the same way about the Minutemen, the Nation of Ulysses, and the latter-day works of Black Flag and Fugazi too, so it wasn't anything personal against Refused). It wasn't until I was in college, when I revisited The Shape of Punk to come, when it really clicked with me. Did it become my new favorite album? Not really, but I finally began to understand what made it so revolutionary.

That said, getting to see them perform last night (albeit via a terrible, choppy webstream due to me using my tiny little netbook), was still something I'm glad I got to experience. I'm sure that watching the stream paled in comparison to actually being there in person, although it's not like I was going to be at Coachella anyway. I'm not going to do an actual show review, partly because I didn't actually experience it in person, but also because I didn't quite catch the whole performance... The band still had tremendous amounts of energy at the end, so I would assume that they still had that spark the entire time. They tore through songs like Refused Are Fucking Dead, Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull, and New Noise, and I wouldn't be surprised if their set was almost entirely composed of songs from The Shape of Punk to Come. It was nice to see that they haven't let their time apart slow them down, even if their post-Refused projects have taken a slower approach. My only regret is that I wish I had gotten to experience it live.

Toward the end of the set, Dennis made some remarks about how cool it was to be playing for such a large and responsive crowd. To paraphrase him, it was "humbling to four guys from Sweden, especially when considering that [their] last US show was in a tiny Virginian basement to 40 people." I'm sure it was humbling.

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