ReABBAfused – The Shape of Visitors to Come (A Bloggable Comparison in 12 Points)

Our next spotlight was supposed to be on the one album we have on The List from Swedish hardcore punk band Refused, as randomly chosen by survey1 on Mastodon. However, there was recently a (friendly) kerfuffle in the Fediverse as to whether ABBA or Refused2 was the best band to come out of Sweden. So as not to show a bias either way, this spotlight will therefore be shared among the two bands, as we also have one album on The List from ABBA. We shall compare 12 points about each album, namely Refused’s 1998 The Shape of Punk to Come (A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts) and ABBA’s 1981 The Visitors (presenting the details about the Refused album first solely because this was, after all, supposed to be a Refused spotlight), and then you can (re-)decide for yourself which one your prefer. Okej?

1. The List number: The Refused album was added pretty darn quickly to this project, coming in at number 27 (submitted by mbr), whereas ABBA was a rather late addition, at number 896 (submitted by arratoon). Anyone conversant in numerology?
2. Album title: The Refused title seems to tell you exactly what you can expect from the contents (…or does it? who uses the word “chimerical”? and is “bombination” even a word?!3), plus is a witty reference to Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, while the ABBA title could literally be about anything and gives no immediate clues. Both albums have title tracks.
3. Release year: The Refused album came out in 1998, a year in which a LOT of shitty stuff happened, including Google being founded and (as we find out below) Refused breaking up. In comparison, ABBA’s album came out in 1981, which was on average “better” – and MTV first aired in ’81 – but Bob Marley died that year, so.
4. Album art: The cover of the Refused album is a play on the cover of the 1994 7″ Teen-Age Dance Session by New Jersey post-hardcore band Rye and the Coalition (now just called Rye Coalition), which itself is a play on the cover of the 1954 album of the same name by US big band Dan Terry and His Orchestra. The ABBA cover is simply a photo of the band members, in separate corners of a darkly lit (and apparently unheated) studio, with a painting of an angel as the backdrop (perhaps referencing the angel in the track “Like An Angel Passing Through My Room”, or perhaps pointing to angels being “the visitors”). This was the first ABBA album cover to not have them standing close together as a happy group.
5. Genre: The Refused album at its core is hardcore punk/post-hardcore, but it contains multitudes, including jazz, electronic, and ambient interludes, etc. The ABBA album of course is pop, but a darker, sadder, almost bleak pop than the band is generally associated with.
6. Length: The Refused album has 12 tracks, clocking in at just over 55 minutes. The ABBA album has 9 tracks, over a total of nearly 38 minutes.
7. Recording: Perhaps the opposite of what would be expected, the Refused album was primarily recorded using analog tape (24-track 2″ tape), while the ABBA album was primarily recorded using a (32-track) digital recorder (making it one of the first records to be digitally recorded).
8. Topics: Pretty much the entirety of the Refused album – and the band as a whole – is political in nature. The ABBA album has a couple songs on Cold War-era topics (the title track and “Soldiers”), but otherwise the lyrics are primarily about love and relationships, in one way or another.
9. Always Coca-Cola?: The very first track on the Refused album includes the (clearly anti-capitalist) lines: “I took the first bus out of Coca-Cola city / It made me feel all nauseous and shitty”. The second-last track on the ABBA album, on the other hand, was released in Japan as a Coca-Cola promo 7″.
10. Break it up break it up break it up (or…not?): Refused broke up just weeks before the release of The Shape of Punk, during an unfinished promo tour for the album (the abrupt end of which was the moment the cops pulled the plug while they were playing the prophetic song “Refused Are Fuckin’ Dead”).4 As for ABBA, both marital couples that made up the band had just gotten divorced before making The Visitors, and they broke up as a band the following year. Both bands, however, reunited in the 2010s (2012 for Refused, 2015 for ABBA) and released another album or two.
11. Got it covered: Just last month, a covers album called The Shape of Punk to Come Obliterated was released, featuring the likes of Brutus, Cult of Luna, Fucked Up, and Touché Amoré, among others. The Visitors, afaik, has yet to be covered as a whole album. Both albums, however, have been cited as an influence on a number of artists.
12. Closing arguments: On the side of Refused, Mastodon user mbr offers this lyric as a closing argument: “How can we expect anyone to listen if we’re using the same old voice? We need new noise!” On the side of ABBA, Mastodon user derthomas offers this lyric as a closing argument: “Thank you for the music.” (Both mbr and derthomas also provided glorious supporting gifs but, alas, Mastodon ate them.)

Choose wisely…or, well, refuse to choose and, uh, bombinate(?) about both albums equally, or something. But remember, kids, you can’t spell “Black Sabbath” without “ABBA”.

• Bandcamp: Refused – The Shape of Punk to Come (A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts)
• Discogs: Refused – The Shape of Punk to Come (A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts)
• Songlink: ABBA – The Visitors (apologies for linking to a deluxe edition, standard version not available)
• Discogs: ABBA – The Visitors

1The survey choices that initially led to this spotlight were “What do I see across the way (hey)”, “See myself molded in clay (oh)”, “Stares at me, yeah I’m afraid (hey)”, and “Changing the shape of his face (aw yeah)”, following the earlier survey with “Sitting on an angry chair”, “Angry walls that steal the air”, and “Stomach hurts and I don’t care”. The last option was the winning selection, and so the survey result was translated as picking the album in The List that contained a word from the phrase, namely “shape”.
2In a Mastodon poll with 17 respondents, ABBA beat Refused with 53% of the vote, although there were also many other write-in candidates proposed.
3It is.
4Click here for the band’s official and spectacular break-up statement, which ends with this: “This is the last that we have to say about it, WE WILL NOT GIVE INTERVIEWS TO STUPID REPORTERS who still haven’t got anything of what we are all about, we will never play together again and we will never try to glorify or celebrate what was. All that we have to say has been said here or in our music/manifestos/lyrics and if that is not enough you are not likely to get it anyway. WE THEREFORE DEMAND THAT EVERY NEWSPAPER BURN ALL THEIR PHOTOS OF REFUSED so that we will no longer be tortured with memories of a time gone by and the mythmaking that single-minded and incompetent journalism offers us. Instead we need to look forward. We got everything to win and nothing but our boredom to lose.“