Saturday, October 20, 2007
Schwermut Forest - Nischenoperation
Schwermut Forest Nischenoperation 45 (Kollaps, 1994)
Got this gem in a batch of records that I bought off a guy I know. Had no idea what it was before hand, but the stack that I was looking at had enough known winners to take a chance on the others...and I am gand I did.
Schwermut Forest has journeyed from skewed eyed indie rock to post-rock, all the while tossing off bits like Nischenoperation, a great tune which reaches back to Rough Trade's post punk slurge and further back to krautrock classism. It is also not too difficult to find. -Scott S.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Henry Fiat's Open Sore - Headshots E.P.
Henry Fiat's Open Sore 'Headshots E.P.' EP (Repo, 1998)
When the history of the Swedish contribution to 90s Rock is written, probably by someone with a complete run of the early Hellacopters 45s close at hand and a Vegas-style shirt with flames on the lower hem draped over his corpus, I'm forced to smirkingly ponder the possibility that Henry Fiat's Open Sore would not get any run at all. Oh, they might get mentioned in passing, just a namecheck really, since in the end Henry Fiat missed out on the Hives payday. They had folks in their corner like Frank Kozik (it says here friends close, and enemies closer, but who can tell?) and most of the crew at Maximum Rock 'N Roll and a few others but HFOS just played too hard 'n fast to pull the casual Live 105 rockers who needed that whole freeze-dried "Let's Save Rock!!" pose to justify their attention. Of course, HFOS mainly traded in a equally pat nihilism that traced it's immediate lineage back to the early 90s Dwarves, but since that particular unit was producing pretty watery asspaint by that point, HFOS done snatched their hateful crown when they weren't looking.
So this is one of HFOS' first stand alone EPs, their first LP was actually released just prior to this. Three short blasts of what the elders call punk rock, and I don't think anyone will accuse of us of a "garage" bias on this one. I personally find "The Anti-Man" to be the finest example of their work from the 90s. They contined for some time into the 21st Century and just released a split record last year that betrayed no signs of the deprivations of Chronos. -Ryan W.
