More to Come

George Benson: Footin’ It
From The Shape of Things to Come (A&M, 1968)

Refused: The Deadly Rhythm (Of the Production Line)
From The Shape Of Punk to Come (Epitaph, 1998)

Naming your album “The Shape of such-and-such to Come” would seem like a pretty pretentious move in my book if it weren’t for the unusually high level of quality most of the albums I can think of with that title seem to exhibit. I even like the damn Dilated song “Shape of Things to Come,” and that’s just about the only song by those guys I’m still feeling these days. Not to say that these albums are all as influential or as ahead of their time as Ornette Coleman’s “Shape of Jazz to Come” album, but the artists do seem to be on to something.

A no brainer for this site, George Benson’s Shape of Things to Come and especially the leadoff track “Footin’ It” has almost undeniable appeal. Music like this makes me want to “barbecue and boogaloo,” as Diamond D says. On a side note, I got this record a couple of years ago when Maru and I went to a weird Audiophile stereo spot in SD he put me up on that had a room full of records. I’m trying to remember what he got…

I’m guessing that when this Refused song comes up on people’s podcasts, they’re either going to be like “Hell Yeah!” or “What the Hell?” Definitely not the style of things we usually post, but a fantastic piece of music all the same. The Refused broke up right around the time this record was released, but I’m almost hard put to imagine where they would have gone from here anyway. “Deadly Rhythm” exhibits perfectly what I like so much about this album. Jazz breaks interspersed with hardcore fury. The playing is tight, the lyrics are dogmatic and angry, and the polyrhythms are unlike anything I’ve heard in punk music before. Listen to the very end of the song, where they shift the quintessential blues riff across the beat for a much straighter, plodding feel. Like most people who own this record, I wish there were more music like this out there.

One more quick thought: I was just looking over this post and was thinking it’s kind of odd that each record I posted with the “shape” title came out within the last two years of its decade. Kind of a pedestrian observation, but still.