Album Review: Refused – War Music

After Refused’s split in 1998, it took 14 years for them to spread their various music wings (including the excellent [International] Noise Conspiracy) and reset their personal lives. They reconvened for live shows in 2012 and then delivered the strong comeback album Freedom in 2015. It showed they were still vital and able to conjure up fire-in-the-belly, forward-thinking heavy music. 

War Music solidifies the band’s return to active duty, but it’s a more refined and compact take on the modern rock album. Trimmed of any excess, it rips and roars across ten songs in 35 minutes. There’s little diversion into synth interludes or overly prog workouts. Instead, it keeps things locked tightly around precise and knotty guitar riffs and a rhythm section that still kicks and drives with metronomic muscle.

Not everything works though. Malfire swaps intensity for more melodic commercial rock shapes and it just sounds overplayed; as does the punk-pop melody of the chorus in I Wanna Watch The World Burn. The second half of the album is where Refused really find their feet. Turn The Cross tumbles violently with tangled breakneck playing from all band members. It sounds truly thrilling, a band on knife's edge, right on the lip of the wave. They follow that with Damaged III, a song that would fit on any Rage Against The Machine album. When they re-enter the maelstrom after coming to a momentary halt, it’s like the swing of a sledgehammer. The Infamous Left is an exercise in old school thrash-metal before the band close the album with the stomp and swagger of Economy Of Death.

The themes of War Music are the same we've come to expect from the band, with Dennis Lyxzen howling and screaming about protest, struggle, revolution and inequality. With Refused, it’s about the sound though – that hurricane of distortion and militant rhythms, where primal physicality and intelligent application combine to create the band’s intoxicating noise.