Barren Womb is due to kick off their first ever UK Tour in a matter of weeks (details here). Expect an unorthodox yet weirdly catchy and unholy racket from their guitar/vocals/drums core.

In the meantime, Tony Gonzalez of Barren Womb joins us to wax lyrical about about Laughing With Daggers by Norwegian hardcore punk/screamo band from JR Ewing (not that one).

IN A SORRY STATE

At the turn of the millennium, my musical taste was in a sorry state. I had run the gamut of Nu Metal and drifted into the  2nd and 3rd (de)generation of this particular style, and I was utterly and completely bored with it. Black Metal was popular in my small hometown of Narvik at the time, but all the orchestrated pomp and corpse-painted goblins native to the genre were severely off-putting to me, so I just couldn’t get into it (luckily, the almighty Darkthrone showed me the true way many, many funeral moons later). I needed something fresh to blow my narrow mind in these formative years, and that revelation finally came when some friends turned me on to a loud and fast outfit from Oslo called JR Ewing.

From the very moment I heard the propulsive drum-and-guitar salvo that open up the ridiculously good Laughing With Daggers, I was hooked. This wasn’t the slow and repetitious (repetition is failure, after all) tedium I had grown to accept from the musical swamp I had been stuck in: It felt vital, liberating and just the right sort of dangerous. The guitars were jangly and relatively undistorted, while the bass ran counter to this with all its fuzzed-out sweetness.

SIMILAR SONIC SCHTICK

I had heard a similar sonic schtick before through Rage Against The Machine, but where Rage were controlled and groovy, JR Ewing were chaotic and unhinged, sounding pretty much like the wheels were going to fall off around the next bend. Yet they never did. This is part and parcel because of the jaw-dropping drumming on display here, performed with scalpel precision at break-neck-speeds. Smack in the middle of this world class punk routine sat a half-sung, half-screamed vocal brimming over with personality, passion and melodic intent, belting out lyrics that felt so meaningful that I to this day don’t understand exactly what they are about.

It wasn’t just Laughing With Daggers that carried such enormous weight for me. Ride Paranoia, the album that song is lifted from, is an 11/10 experience and I listened to it endlessly back in the day. The intensity and sense of melody lovingly shoved into every crevasse of those 13 tracks represent a paradigm shift in how I think about music. Up until that point, I had had very little dealings with punk and the surrounding DIY culture, but now I was obsessed, spending every waking moment researching bands and dreaming of one day touring squats and dive bars around Europe.

A SENSE OF PURPOSE

It imbued me with a sense of purpose and simultaneously prompted me to expand my record collection considerably. Wonderful bands like At The Drive-In, Refused, Fugazi and Drive Like Jehu were adjacent to JR Ewing and therefore easy enough to get into, but it also opened the doors to everything from grindcore to pop and even electronic music.

Although I’ve kept expanding my influences since that special time in the early ought’s, ‘Ride Paranoia” still stands as a fundamental blueprint for how I approach songwriting and the sonics I’m interested in achieving. I was also fortunate enough to witness JR Ewing live in their heyday as well, which only further cemented their complete epicness. The impact this band, which started as joke in Oslo in 1998, has had on my artistic life cannot be understated and I wholeheartedly thank them for it.

Our thanks to Tony and don’t forget to head along to a show – details here.

You can read more from our extensive archive of Why I Love pieces from a wide array of artists on an even wider array of subjects, here.

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