VARIOUS ARTISTS
Stockholms Mangel

61 songs / 73 minutes
Swedish Punk Classics
- 7 -

 Sweden has been known for high quality crust core for a very long time, but the origins of that scene go back to the mid-Eighties, where a few guys played in a lot of different bands. The original "Stockholms Mangel" was a tape compilation, but SPC Records have added a lot of rare and unreleased material to make their first release attractive to the punk community. 6 bands are featured on the CD (or limited double-LP): Mob 47, Agoni, Crudity, Protes Bengt, Discard and Röjers, who more or less all have the same musical style. Discard for instance are so deeply influened by Discharge, that they not only share the nearly same name, but also had identic song structures and similar lyrics.
The CD booklet contains a lot of praise for a man called Åke who was the founder of the comparatively small Stockholm scene and who played in four on this CD's featured bands; all of these bands are related to each other in some obscure way.
We could start discussing about the quality of this CD, and although I have to admit that it's a historically important document, the recording quality is not always up to our modern standards. Punk purists won't really care about this, but then there have been so many great crust bands in the Nineties (with better recording equipment) that this compilation will be mostly appealing to collectors and purists. I personnally think these 61 songs get monotonous after 20 minutes, and it's really hard to listen to it in one attempt. Still a nice and well filled package that has its right to existence.

Back