Now playing: Your Problem; Naken, blästrad och skitsur; Feel Like Magnum, Look Like Higgins
Sweden's finest.
From France to South Africa to Japan to Turkey the whole world put their own unique spins on nu-metal and pretty much nobody outside of those places knows it. It’s part of the bigger mission here, getting it all gathered up and presentable because if you think America was the only place innovating this music you’re wrong. In fact, if we had been able to build a global nu-metal community back then who knows what kind of results we would have heard. I wasn’t aware of a Swedish nu-metal scene until my patented technique of Never Logging Off alerted me to both LOK and Psycore which forced me to consider I was really missing out. Here’s three of the best I’ve discovered recently, I suspect there will be a lot more to come:
Your Problem, Psycore [1998, V2]
“Love is a helmet / and there’s a war outside,” is a versatile lyric, as easy to imagine wailed by a pop diva as shrieked by an emo chanteuse. How about dryly intoned over some nu-metal? Markus Jaan gravely speaks his verses like a worn down salaryman ashing his cigarette behind a bar, someone that has been there done that and wants you to do a little better than he did. His naked voice is the first sound on the record, a tensely muttered “I can never be / what you want me to be / I can never do what you want me to” then a brutish nu-metal drop highlighted by the best snare sound this side of Terry Date’s mixing board. Jaan’s pragmatic spoken word is offset with an urgent shout, a coworker letting the office know he’s had it up to here and will take no more of this shit. But for every drop of nu-metal philosophy there’s always something hilariously off kilter to offset, songs about chocolate milkshakes or a finale that swaggers back into the office the next day hammered drunk. That lyric about love being a helmet? It’s followed with a question: “How come you can’t accept the fat sweaty person on the seat next to you on the concord to paradise?” Let’s see the pop diva try that one on for size. A
Naken, blästrad och skitsur, LOK [1999, Sonnet]
LOK is a shortening of “locomotive,” a name chosen to describe the band’s heavy and relentless sound. Accurate. Their debut album, Naken, blästrad och skitsur (English: Naked, blasted and pissed off), is an unstoppable force of dense Swedish rapping and raw, stripped down nu-metal instrumental. “Lok står när de andra faller” and “Experiment” have primally satisfying riffs galore while the lyrics, obviously inscrutable to me but Google tells me the first song starts with Daniel not paying for breakfast or something, are delivered as an aggressively enjoyable tumble of vowels and consonant sounds. Language barrier my ass. This will get you bouncing no matter where you’re from. A-
Feel Like Magnum, Look Like Higgins, Swedens Finest [2003, 12-51]
Swedens Finest is a bold band name. Bolder still is your lead single being about how much you like it whether you know it or not. “You might think you don’t like this,” hollers Markus Jaan on “Peek-A-Boo” in a voice noticeably more commanding and unhinged than he was in Psycore, “You do. Believe me, you do.” Trading the dry vocal mix of Your Problem for a massive empty gymnasium delay/reverb he sounds almost frighteningly huge over the band’s bent over row of dirty guitar and bass. While Feel Like Magnum, Look Like Higgins isn’t as focused as Jaan’s previous band - the dancehall pastiche of “Back With a Bounce” is a bit undercooked - there’s quite a bit here to experience that you’d never get from American nu-metal. And if you might think you don’t like this well… B+
Always kinda bitter when I hear about good music coming out of Scandinavia because they have the better quality of life and government, and now they're going to do music better than the U S of A? They got some nerve 😆
But in seriousness I find it interesting how often you use imagery taken from workaday office jobs in your reviews. Write what you know, I suppose!