Twenty-five years after releasing their first album,
Refused are still angry, and why not? The global chaos, political repression, and economic inequality that has always fueled their wrath is as bad as ever, so if there was ever a time for them to unleash another salvo of articulate rage, it's in the waning months of the 2010s. 2019's
War Music sounds exactly like what you would expect from a
Refused album, with the guitars either slashing or barking, the bass thick and ominous, the drums exploding like rifle fire, and the vocals all impassioned bellowing on behalf of the revolution. What has always set
Refused apart from their peers is the precision of their attack and the intensity of their lyrical focus, and in these respects, the group have lost nothing in terms of expertise or ferocity in the course of a quarter-century. Some might question the revolutionary credentials of a band as successful as
Refused, especially given their lucrative reunion shows after returning to duty for what was supposed to be a one-off tour in 2012. But if they're just trying to seem cool to a handful of leftist punks, it's hard to imagine they would try this hard, in terms of both music and message, with a vehement hatred of injustice in all forms and a demand for direct action explicit or implicit in every song. For sheer rabble-rousing power,
War Music makes
Rage Against the Machine's catalog sound like
Peter, Paul & Mary, and as punk rock this group remains the gold standard of hardcore, as good and as pure as this stuff gets. Ultimately,
War Music doesn't sound especially innovative, particularly stacked up against their 1998 masterpiece
The Shape of Punk to Come. But it speaks to a world still wrestling with problems that have divided society for centuries, and
Refused aren't rehashing old arguments so much as they're launching one more campaign in a war they cannot bear to surrender. ~ Mark Deming