THE JURY OF ICU

[Steve Swann]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Jonathan Jarrett
<jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, Steve Swann wrote:
>>>
>>> On 4/29/09, trev <judge48 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> (text disintegration) It's called the Fury of ICU, because we play
>>>> furiously on it and we were actually furious at the time.
>>
>> Oh thank god - I thought it was the Furry of ICU, performed in their
>> Bunny suits:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8MkVIe9xGc
>>
>> ;-)
>
>        Oh thank gods in turn, it's not actually Nik in a bunny suit. I
> didn't feel it could be ruled out. Which raises the question, Steve, how did
> you come across that and is the rest of their stuff any good, do you know?
> (It's a band called Refused. They're so punk I can't tell what language they
> sing in, but also so pop that it's in perfect time and was probably mostly
> done on a sequencer :-) ) Yours,

I came across that Refused video, believe it or not, on MTV2 during
their inaugural year when they were actually an awesome music station.
 The year after that, the suits moved in and turned the station
another load of VH1-type generic pap.  But for that one year, they
were amazing, and played all kinds of edgy alternative and punk.

It *is* in English by the way, just shrieked in a Swedish accent.  ;-)

The song was consciously written to be a new punk music manifesto:
http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/refused/newnoise.html

I love the idea of it, but I'm afraid that musically, Refused is kind
of all over the place.  I really like the song New Noise, but a lot of
the rest of it is just too unmelodic for me.  I sort of prefer the
spin-off band The (International) Noise Conspiracy - I feel that their
songwriting, while less bold/daring than Refused, is more consistently
enjoyable...

Steve