The world is, as many bands have documented, a vile and evil place. As we know in the 70s and 80s punk bands and hardcore bands tried to tell us this as much as possible.As the album name would suggest Rifu are hear to tell us the same thing. Ok so it wud be easy to describe this album as punk as F'uck and leave it as that but there is more to it.
Rifu have been around for a fair while, they released their Debut album "Revolutionary Tango (The Slavery Dance)" in 2001 and followed it up with "Dead End Street" in 2003. Now they have a new deal with Go Kart records and a new album.
Rifu are:
Øyvind Sarheim - Lead vocals / Guitar
Stian Andreassen (a.k.a. NL) - Guitar
Erlend Laanke - Bass / B. vocals
Ola Pettersen - Drums / B. vocals
Ok so to begin with the obvious, the lyrics written by Rifu are relentlessly political as you may expect from hardcore bands, these lyrics are screamed and shouted and also occasionally sung. Though hardcore, melodic punk inlfluences do rear their heads in this album and occasionally laid back instrumentals take place.
Ok so it's sounding diverse so far, right? Well fnas of this kind of music won't be too impressed on grounds of originality. for instance Refused's experimental approahc to hardcore appears in amny of Rifu's riffs as well as the husky screams and are a clear inlfuence on rifu, but the point of Refused was that they sounded like Refused and made major steps towards originality, rifu however make none of their own steps towards creating a sound they can truly call their own. At The Drive-In also make themsleves known as influences, with vocals even ocasionally coming danerously close to a Cedric Bixler yelp. Propghandi's influence is also not understated and so this may leave people feeling kind of like they should have bought the originals.
Standout Tracks:
Sold out World:
This song is probably waht a Cedric Bixler and Jello Biafra co-project would sound like. Hardcore as hell but it sort of seems that it is just Cedric singing for Black Flag. Still a good track undeniably.
Let Them Eat Bombs:
A melodic intro with a powerful hardcore shouted vocal. quite clever quiet-loud dynamic takes place in the song. Not too original but quite efective. Basically everyone knows that it's a formula that works well and this is no exception to that rule. Key lyirc: "digging for black gold in a pool of molested children"
Spitting at the Remains:
Enjoyably bleak and screamy, if there is such a thing. ok so you know it's ahrdcore by thi point and have got over th unoriginality and decided to enjoy at least 2 songs this will probably be the one that heavier music fans like.
For fans of:
Refused
At the Drive in
Propaghandi
overall:
Its nothing new really. The bands who influenced rifu can proudly call themselves new or at least more original. Rifu, however, never seem to do something with hardcore music that is easily labelled as Rifu's new idea. So good hardcore album in a way but u shud by the originals.
