At The Drive-In's break-up drew the battle lines. The soldiers were marked and ready to battle once and for all: it was classic rock or the death of us all. When Mars Volta began their Rush/Led Zeppelin/Santana side of the argument, Sparta began their steady diet of pop nonsense, and my friends were not ones to take this battle lightly. A lot of them joined new bands—some growing their hair out to epic proportions and buying new shiny feedback and delay pedals, some cutting their hair mock-stylishly and reminiscing about Jimmy Eat World's "Clarity" and citing themselves as supporters of Sunny Day Real Estate's "The Rising Tide." As all of this happened, hard-rocking Norsemen began to do something that no one really anticipated. They stopped caring either way.
This peaked with the release of two albums: JR Ewing's "Ride Paranoia" and Trapdoor Fucking Exit's "Be Not Content." Particularly, "Ride Paranoia" struck a chord with a crowd of those not interested in either Sparta or Mars Volta, per se. The album screamed, wailed, cursed, rocked harder and got louder than anything since Sleepytime Trio's compendium of songs "Memory Minus" in the late nineties. In fact, it surprised many that the album didn't debut around when Drive Like Jehu signed to Interscope.
The insouciance/apathy made a lot of sense. Sweden hit a nerve—it didn't matter that the battle lines existed. Some times you just want to beat the holy hell out of everything alive or maybe eat the souls of everything around you. Sometimes you want to look like a fool driving around in a hundred degree heat remembering why Refused, Sleepytime, At the Drive-In and countless other bands completely screwed us all by calling it quits at the top of their game (note: as you read this, JR Ewing is finished as well). Sometimes you wanted the repetition to get so loud that you could feel your head getting slaughtered—the mixture of hardcore, metal, classic rock, and wuss rock coming together so beautifully it could only lead to a complete revolution.
Yet, the revolution never came. The battle lines blurred a bit; the soldiers grew older and wise enough to know that new music rarely ever matters. In the rubble, JR Ewing took their time. They waited to offer their newest battle call: Maelstrom. I'm not sure what the word means (it's tough to find a Swede-English free translation on the ole interweb). Maybe it stands for the lustrous pounding of drums and the meandering vocal structure. Maybe it means some thing simple. Possibly, it longs for the old revolution, as each song is a battle cry to those that never really cared. The longtime bystanders never catered to enough to believe that anything glittering every existed are culled from their conversations about the late nineties. Cheesy as it sounds, someone's got to scream at these people—the Nordic folks just have the energy and impetus to pull it off.
The one large scale improvement from the anthem-driven "Ride Paranoia" is a dynamic used not from sounds and guitar breaks, but from vocal melody and instrumentation. Gone are the battle lines and constant screeching, and so too goes the anger. Maelstrom's gain is the people's lost attitude—where Mars Volta and Sparta leave gaps of anger or melody, Maelstrom slips in a guitar hook or vocal melody that doesn't shout heartbreak or lead into a 4 minute Santana breakdown.
Instead, JR Ewing lead the listeners into the pointed structure and overt intensity that made their battle all the more important. The battle lines are not fraught with peril, but fought with precision—the one thing JR Ewing and the Nordic soldiers had right all along. |