There are the essential albums that need to be in everyone's collection. There are the personal favorites, the ones that aren't highly acclaimed but still get played every once in a while. And then there are the albums that you stick in the back of your collection because you want to forget that you spent money on them. "Own It or Disown It" gives the writer the opportunity to look at such discarded albums and determine if they are diamonds in the rough or if they deserve to be used as mini-frisbees.
In 1998, the Refused released The Shape of Punk to Come, one of the greatest hardcore punk albums of all time. It influenced a lot of people, got a lot of kids interested in the scene (including myself), and more than thirteen years removed from its release, the album hasn’t aged a day. When tasked with putting together a list of the greatest albums of the past fifteen years, The Shape of Punk to Come placed third on my list, behind El-P’s Fantastic Damage and Subtle’s For Hero: For Fool. In short, I love that damn album, and I can’t humor people who don’t like it.
And then the band broke up. And then the members of the band continued to make music. And most of that music was terrible.
Okay, that’s unfair—I haven’t heard most of the post-Refused output these guys released, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The two big groups that formed from the Refused’s demise (in much the same way that At the Drive-In’s demise lead to The Mars Volta and Sparta) were The (International) Noise Conspiracy and TEXT. T(I)NC featured the lead singer of the Refused, Dennis Lyxzen, while TEXT was comprised of everyone else from the Refused. I haven’t heard much of TEXT, though, and the little I did hear more than ten years ago I dismissed as sounding too weird. It’s possible that I would actually enjoy it now, but as far as I know, the music is still difficult to find.
T(I)NC was a pop-punk outfit who mistook themselves for actual punks. I initially planned for this column to focus on their first album, 2000’s Survival Sickness, but the damn thing holds up pretty well. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t hold a candle to what came before it, but it moves at a fast clip and A New Morning, Changing Weather, however, is the real deal—a pop-punk album that brings no new ideas to the table, botches its stolen ideas, and operates as the antithesis of everything that its most visible member sang about in his finest hour. I like to joke about destroying albums that I don’t approve of, but in this case, I might have to actually go through with it.
Before I pound this thing into dust, though, I should probably explain its failings as it doesn’t seem too bad on the surface. In many ways, it resembles its predecessor—it is a pop-punk album that moves at a fast clip, Lyxzen sings about exhaustion, rebellion, capitalism, etc., and they are almost the same length. In fact, I’d say that A New Morning’s high points top anything on Survival Sickness—“A Northwest Passage” and “Up For Sale” get the album started on a high note, while “Capitalism Stole My Virginity” is a late standout. So what went horribly wrong?
Answer: the Strokes. I won’t claim that I know what the recording process of this album was like, but it is all too easy to imagine that the band sat down with their producer, played him a copy of Is This It?, and told him that they wanted to “do that”. Before I “had” to listen to this album earlier in the week, I had not made it past “Bigger Cages, Longer Chains” (and that’s the third track). The first two songs are driven by guitars and percussion. “Bigger Cages, Longer Chains” is driven by an organ. No, really. Much of the rest of the album relies more on composition and writing than execution, which is like telling a caffeinated child who can color a blank page in five seconds to paint the Sistine Chapel. The longer compositions on The Shape of Punk to Come worked because the backing band knew how to keep things interesting. These guys don’t.
On top of being derivative and poorly written, the album has no flavor. Survival Sickness had genuine enthusiasm; A New Morning, Changing Weather has fake enthusiasm. If Dennis Lyxzen of the Refused met Dennis Lyxzen from The (International) Noise Conspiracy, he’d kick his ass. Then again, though the Refused have reunited, The (International) Noise Conspiracy haven’t broken up. I don’t know how Lyxzen would kick his own ass, but I think that science could lend a hand. Now where’s my flamethrower?
VERDICT: DISOWN
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