Chad Jewett, guitarist and singer in New England mod/punk band Perennial, told us about his Refused experience...
Chad Jewett: Refused Is Fucking Dead.
Or at least they were at the time. At least that’s what they said.
When I discovered the band they had disbanded five years earlier, and it was either their storytelling savvy, a fluke of history, or both, that The Shape Of Punk To Come — Refused’s 1998 swan-song and post-hardcore magnum opus — was so full of poetry, intrigue, romance, and arcane profundity that it would make both band and record the stuff of intoxicating mystery. Record a perfect album, full of left-field electronica, Beat Poetry allusions, spoken-word insinuation and Pop Art provocation, then disappear.
What could a young Rock & Roll obsessive — equally taken with guitar feedback and post-modern poetics — possibly find more compelling?
We spent hours, days when you add it all up, poring over this album: the way the band would bend and heave between truly gargantuan hardcore and nimble, quicksilver jazz. The samples, from another time, another place, another language. The history of 20th century music made exquisitely physical and unapologetically leftist. We fell in love with a ghost.
And then they were back. A reunion tour, a setlist built almost entirely around The Shape Of Punk To Come, the Swedish quintet — in true heavy mod fashion — decked out in impeccably tailored suits, playing their impossibly complex and specific album with genuinely shocking precision. The stuff that dreams are made of. I did my level best to avoid YouTube clips and other spoilers. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to go in fresh. Boston, July 2012. The band behind a floor-to-ceiling black curtain as a sound collage of feedback and drones waxes and wanes. Then the wall of noise recedes to just a single voice:
“Worms of the Senses, Faculties of the Skull”.
An Allen Ginsberg quote. The title of the first song off The Shape Of Punk To Come. And in this instance, the one sentence recipe for rocket fuel.
The curtain drops, the band is already in mid-roar:
“I’VE GOT A BONE TO PICK WITH CAPITALISM. AND A FEW TO BREAK!”
Refused Is Fucking Alive.
Perennial's album Modernism is out September 18.
