As a kid I remember reading in the Guinness Book something about Van Halen being the loudest band in the world. Impressive. They displaced Deep Purple. I think Manowar might have it now. To be honest, I was never much taken by such shows of largess: all it meant was they could afford big amps. I got to thinking in terms of world records, though, while listening to Ride Paranoia, the second full-length by Oslo's JR Ewing. For its 34 minutes, vocalist Andreas Tylden screams at earsplitting levels, uncoiling insane vocalizations over Keith Moon drum theatrics so powerful, walls start to buckle and bend. With the right management Tylden could win decibel-blasting contests, take gold to Norway, display the shiny shit besides a couple of Happy Tom's stained sailor caps in Oslo's imaginary rock 'n' roll hall of fame.
Since 1998, JR Ewing's caustically winded approach has been on the verge of breaking something: imagine drenched and heaving bodies caved-in from exertion, how eels supposedly implode after traveling hundreds of miles to spawn in the Sargasso Sea. Sonically, the purest comparison is Drive Like Jehu, or the louder factions of the Gravity Records roster-- maybe Clikatat Ikatowi. It'd seem Oslo's but a few miles north of San Diego.
Ride Paranoia opens with a loose, sputtering guitar cable trying to establish a flow of electricity, which shifts into the manic drum roll, fill and sliced guitars of the fairly pitch-perfect "Repetition Is Failure". Within its onslaught, Tylden's backdrop pauses momentarily to make way for his shout of, "Stop cutting the hair and start living for a change," after which the album-- doing speed-freak one-armed pushups-- happily avoids calming down or even taking much of a breather. Some songs might rely too much on dynamics to propel-- never focusing on much beyond their composition-- and as is often the case with rock of this sort, a few songs suffer from sameness. "Naked Pavements" is akin to an overlong Jawbreaker exercise where Blake pointlessly incorporates movie samples and spoken lyrics. The band's best at short blasts: the histrionics are already epic in scope by just existing so there's no need to drag them out with Unwound-like incidental jams. Usually, though, the sheer momentum of the playing overcomes (or rebounds from) such missteps.
"When You're Gone" is the bottled energy of Behead the Prophet and The Locust, but waxing emotional and sappy. Hey, even the frantic get the blues, right? Despite the song's cheesy lyrical turns ("crimson flames running through my heart"), I dig Tylden's sap: his purple prose matches his determined delivery. "Pre Summertime Blues", for example, is equally spaz-core potent, but redeems the crimson flames line with: "A comma counter just shot himself/ A sawdust trail leading nowhere." Nice: the textual conjoining with the corporeal. In "A Case of Evacuation" Tylden goes on about how "being broke is probably the best luxury." The vocal line offers a few "My Generation" stutters and over-enunciations, reminiscent of Nation of Ulysses, torn suits and all. I ultimately prefer these Lou Reed-ish sick city poverty themes ("a sweet syringe lost in a haystack") to the tales of woe-begotten broken hearts, no matter the curative powers of a song's dynamics. A cracked city is filled with human relationships, things broken (and broken things) on a larger scale.
Ride Paranoia's cover depicts abandoned, placed-just-so instruments and amplifiers: the detritus of staged rock excess. Nothing actually looks destroyed, and instead of reading this as a contrivance, I saw it as a reality: some folks just can't afford to break their shit. So you choose your damage. Catharsis is achieved, the metaphor for rock 'n' roll energy is deposited, and you can use your wounded gear the day after next. Ride Paranoia is this intelligent obliteration.
