After a confusing and muddled day, sometimes there's nothing like some primal noise to make it all better. I've had my eye on the shape of punk to come for a while now, once I found out it was the (highly recommended) last release from the band that preceded The (International) Noise Conspiracy. Whilst playing the Amazon ratings game the other week, I noticed they had a couple of free mp3 downloads, and tonight I finally got around to listening to them along with some epitonic stuff I'd grabbed over the past week or so. Some of the good epitonic stuff I picked up included a track from that Luke Vibert and B.J. Cole pedal-steel-with-beats thing that I'd heard on 3RRR once but had only got as far as writing down "Luke Vibert + somebody" before it vacated my head. There was also that Bertrand Burgalat guy I'd seen mentioned at Emperor Norton, and Death By Chocolate was nice, in a playfully silly kind of way.

But back to Refused. I saw the album last week, but it didn't (at the time) quite push me over that "ok, I'm in shopping spree mode" edge - I'd rather buy, say, four CDs at once than just one, so if I can't find more than one, I'll usually wait. No, it doesn't make sense, but this is what too much inner guilt does to you.

But back to Refused. The music gently builds up, and then this guy, this thing, shouts "gonna scream !" and the guitars kick in and then I'm lost in a beautiful cacophony, the sort that makes a certain person I know scrunch up her face and say "eeee ! metal !". It goes right to the end, where he's screaming some imcomprehensible phrase over and over, and then suddenly it's done, and in the same breath you can hear him say "thank you" in a normal, quiet voice that does a reasonable job of distancing itself from what just went on.

Wow.