Right at the start of this reviews update I had the pleasure of being slapped stupid by Swedish scumbags Lautstürmer and just before deadline more of a similar nature flies in all violent and wanting to kick me in the nuts courtesy of Warvictims. We may well have invented this form of music often referred to as D-beat thanks to Discharge in the first place with naturally a healthy dose of Motorhead and then consolidated the cause thanks to old crust merchants and great band The Varukers, but it’s the Swedes that really love it and even refer to the style in their own tongue as kängpunk. Bit of a history lesson dispensed with this is one genre that bands are not particularly bothered about being called generic, hell their whole meaning is to emulate the aforementioned and bands like Discharge were hardly complicated in the first place. Mix it all up with a bit of Doom, GBH and the crust punk of Amebix, Electro Hippies and Chaos UK from the UK and over in Sweden the results are Antisimex, Wolfpack Avskum and of course the excellent Skitsystem, ave it!
Warvictims naturally do not beat about the bush, chucking out a rioutous 14 tracks in 22 minutes. After a nice doom laden and perhaps obligatory intro it’s all guns blazing away with gnarly puked up crusty chaos. Most of the songs have Swedish titles and a few are English and had me looking them up on search engines to see if they were covers as they all sounded like they could have been. If you know this style of music you will know what it and this sounds like and no review is going to change things.
I have to admit the production strikes me as a bit too thick for it’s own good; bass dominates here and everything else struggles a bit to come through. The low / high vocals could certainly do with being up in the mix as far as I am concerned. However as is the unfortunate way of the download generation I am listening to this through computer speakers and that may account for things a little bit. Apparently when the band finished recording this prior to having a label, they ended up with 27 tracks, guess they just picked the best cuts for this but even if they had put them all on we would probably have got an average 44 minute album length. Warvictims have one hell of a lot of releases to their name too, loads of splits as you would suspect. Looking at the cover art of most, which are all in the atypical punk-crust Crass, Discharge style; for some reason they have decided to go for colour with this one, which the purist in me is not quite so keen on.
I would have to say this release is overshadowed a bit by the aforementioned and excellent Lautstürmer and the boom heavy production does not help, apart from that if you can’t get enough of this style then it’s not really going to disappoint.
http://www.myspace.com/warvictims
