Their eponymous debut is a perverse hybrid of Scandinavian death metal and free jazz that refuses to placate audiences.
Lead singer Dennis Lyxzén sounds like he’s having a seizure. The rhythm section of Magnus Flagge on bass and David Sandström on drums pounds away at your skull like a savage headache. And Mats Gustafsson imbues the flute and saxophone with ritual fury.
Unless you are well-versed in the postwar avant-garde, this isn’t the kind of music likely to end up on your Stairmaster playlist. Even “Repeater II”, the shortest and most accessible of the five tracks on the album, bounces around too manically to provide the steady groove preferred for aerobic exercise.
Novelty stresses us out. We crave regularity, something we can count on. That’s why we are so eager to classify.
Once we have assigned a new book, film, album or—dare I say it—lover to a category we are familiar with, we relax, even if doing so requires us to fit the proverbial square peg into a round hole.
The made-up term “death jazz” critiques the conceptual violence of classification. Here is a subgenre to undermine the very idea of subgenres.
As Gustafsson puts it in the liner notes for the album, “music and art without definite labels is a necessity for a better living” Backengrillen invites you to “create your own individual genres and open up for more death-jazz-core-noise-metal-poetry to enter your world of destroying the local and global stupidities around us”.
It’s worth stopping to ask what “stupidities” he and his bandmates have in mind.
For people of a conservative bent, those “stupidities” would presumably include the corporate multiculturalism, promoted from above, that helped inspire the rise of authoritarian populism over the past two decades. From that perspective, the impulse to put everything in a neat-and-tidy boxes goes hand in hand with political correctness and what Elon Musk likes to call the “woke mind virus”.
The members of Backengrillen see things very differently. Like Refused before them (three of its four members were in the legendary punk band), Backengrillen advocate a self-consciously progressive agenda, “anti-fascist and anti-racist”.
But whereas Refused prioritised visceral response over reflection, as was the norm in left-wing hardcore circles, Backengrillen’s aesthetic programme is focused on disrupting the closed circuit of reflex.
Maybe they are making, belatedly, a parallel journey to Fugazi, a band that was defiantly post-hardcore from the outset and ended up rather post-testosterone as well. Instead of the screamed anthems and staccato rhythms favoured within the hardcore idiom, they incline towards a more ambiguous, fluid form of expression.
Songs take too long to reach their destination, if there even is one.
After lumbering forward like an intoxicated troll for over six minutes, opening track “A Hate Inferior” pauses for a lengthy saxophone squall by Gustaffson that splits the difference between Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann.
The title track, also over ten minutes long, features a bass figure so thick it sounds like Flagge is using the cables from a suspension bridge for strings. First Gustaffson dances around it with psychedelic flute filigree, then takes the track into the muck when he switches to the saxophone midway through.
“Dör för långsamt” is even stranger, combining these approaches to produce a meandering cacophony sure to drive away listeners whose idea of a good time is to swirl around the vortex of a testosterone-fueled mosh pit.
In other words, Backengrillen is not a record that Refused diehards are guaranteed to like. This is not fan service.
During Refused’s farewell tour last year, members of the band made it clear that, as grateful as they were for the enthusiastic support, they couldn’t see themselves performing the band’s most popular songs from the 1990s once they neared retirement age.
It was time to move on. But how? The way forward turned out to be a forest path into the past.
Beyond the androcentric aggression that characterised their Epitaph Records labelmates. Beyond Fugazi. Beyond the experiments of the early 1980s No Wave scene, even though you can hear the influence of James Chance whenever Backengrillen get wiggly.
More than anything, these five tracks evoke the heady experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when jazz heretics and rock-and-roll outcasts joined forces to create a dark, disturbing fusion that repudiated both smoky nightclubs and the pop charts.
At their funkiest, Backengrillen are a bit like early Can. The flute parts are like strange cousins of the ones on Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
When the beat breaks down or disappears entirely, Backengrillen comes closer to the out-there sounds made by countercultural visionaries who complained that Ornette Coleman hadn’t pushed far enough into the unknown.
In other words, Backengrillen don’t break a new path so much as clear the overgrowth away from an old one.
Theodor Adorno became famous for his cultural criticism after World War II. But he was a composer at heart. His curmudgeonly dismissal of jazz, for which he has rightly been pilloried, was rooted in his personal experience trying to compose avant-garde “classical” music along the lines of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg.
The farther that early Modernism receded into the past, the more confusing Adorno’s insistence on its novelty became. How could the so-called “New Music” of 1910 still be cutting edge when decades of innovation had followed in its wake?
From Adorno’s perspective, chronologically more recent music, such as Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress, represented an ideological retrenchment, the abandonment of a truly new aesthetic in favour of recycling a more palatable one from the more distant past.
Although Adorno would surely have disapproved of free jazz—even if it did free musicians from being “slaves” to the rhythm—his argument for the New Music, despite its apparent datedness, resonates powerfully with Backengrillen.
In 1969, we managed to put a human being on the moon. Pretty soon, it will be hard to find someone who can write a piece like this one without the help of AI. Given Backengrillen’s investment in culture from the late 1960s and early 1970s, it’s likely that this devolution is one of the “stupidities” they want to combat.
Sometimes the quest for novelty requires us to turn our backs to the future, searching instead for interrupted projects that are worth reviving.
Photograph courtesy of EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid. Published under a Creative Commons license.
