What do you do when the guiding light for your pompous, under-the-pavement-the-beach antics, Sweden's Refused, turn up fucking dead the very same year your band starts, and then their stateside heir-apparent, Amherst's Orchid, also stop barricade-storming and break up right after they've visited you in Europe? If you're Norway's JR Ewing, you write a song called "For We Are Dead" ("Death came and turned my bones to dust and scattered me onto the floor," whispers singer Andreas Tylden) and then you break up too! Find the bad news on their website, where they sign off characteristically: "Repetition Is Failure."
So also went the title of the first track on their last one, 2003's Ride Paranoia, which included for lyrics a bit about "Stop cutting the hair and start living for a change." By then, JR Ewing had done away with the Minor Threat haircuts and San Diego blastbeats they wore for the Coalition Records-style hardcore of 2000's Calling In Dead and 2001's The Perfect Drama, and had instead started living by paying-up the production and making a record critically acclaimed for its, um, "intelligent obliteration." This, I guess, has become the gold-standard for post-Refused Euro acts that do the slashing guitar thing-- politics scooped out of Born Against's trashcan and forcibly mated with the dynamic changes from a The Shape of Punk to Come practice tape.
Of course, the advantage of actually cutting the hair is economy. I caught JR Ewing in Europe circa The Perfect Drama, where the idea was that they were so into chaos that they ended up making sweated-out and to-the-point treble blasts that matched their freedom-forward politic with headlong aural adrenaline. Living for a change was what they did next-- though they later had second thoughts and named Maelstrom's first song "Change is Nothing (Everything Is)"-- and this living, maybe hopefully, is the period of time for which they wrote "Fucking and Champagne", another track from the new one. Living though, as Refused et. al. had already discovered, is a tougher trick than nihilism.
So maybe "Change is Nothing" is defensive-- the kind of thing that people who've gained weight or lost their girlfriend say. JR Ewing might say it to shrug off the fact that right at the point where their old songs would come to a lurching halt, their new ones pick back up with a bloated acoustic guitar break, followed by a guitar solo. Even more pounds show on songs like "Take a Hint", which throws a barbershop quartet into the background.
Of Europe's turn of the century class-- Yage in Germany, Kaospilot and JR Ewing in Norway, Amanda Woodward in France-- JR Ewing are now the last band standing, but they've outgrown their form just as fully as their former counterparts. Tylden's sneering wail has become, on Maelstrom, Mike Patton's falsetto, while the guitars are now hopelessly charged with filling up the space their riffs were originally designed to elide. Personality over fury, as on "Nihilistic Elitist", which wastes perfectly good Hot Snakes guitars on a slow-motion dragger, is an understandable choice but also a dead end. They need a new band to do what they want to do now, and presumably, they'll have one soon. As for bothering with this one at all, now that we know the jig is up, see track eight: "I'm Sorry, You're Sorry, We're All Sorry."
