I don't know what it is with Sweden but I don't think I've heard a Swedish group I didn't like. In fact with the exception of ABBA, who sounded better when I was fourteen, most of the Swedish music I've heard has been the kind of thing you might justifiably kill to own, and the stuff coming out of Sweden in the eighties (back when we were all plugging drum machines into distortion pedals just to see what would happen) was fucking phenomenal. I first heard Fysisk Fostran - which I believe means Physical Education - on their Vi Behöver Ett Odöpt Barn cassette, and I nearly quacked my pants when I discovered someone had given this material a vinyl release. Vi Behöver Ett Odöpt Barn, or We Need an Unbaptised Child according to Google translate, came out in 1983. Räkenskapens Dag collects the best tracks along with others of the time, mostly unreleased, and all of it sounding like rehearsal tapes in terms of quality, but rehearsal tapes where they had the balance absolutely perfect so capturing the sort of wild sonic spontaneity which might have been flattened out in a studio. We have mostly regular instruments attacked with raw punk spirit yielding the fried quality of early Chrome and the ill omen of formative Gristle. It's the sort of deal which could have sounded like a bunch of blokes making a terrible racket, but does something more than what you hear preserved on the original tape, somehow communicating the adrenaline rush of the maelstrom as it occurs and sounding loud regardless of what volume you play it at - Hawkwind inheriting the nuclear wasteland, or something in that direction.
I gather they drifted apart after most of this was recorded, a dissolution informed by the non-appearance of a projected vinyl EP, the demolition of their rehearsal space, and the general indifference bordering on hostility of local audiences. The sleeve notes suggest individual members accepting the inevitability of extinction, rationalising that Fysisk Fostran had been of its time and was as such a success on its own terms. Its difficult to tell where they would have gone from here, so leaving this collection to stand alone as an act which was never followed, and perhaps could not have been followed. This will seem like hyperbole until you listen to this stuff and consider that barely anyone sounded like this in 1984 - sludge metal with something weird and slightly scary replacing the stoner element, he said still scrabbling around for a description that doesn't fall apart once the needle hits the next track.
Outstanding. I'll leave it at that.
I gather they drifted apart after most of this was recorded, a dissolution informed by the non-appearance of a projected vinyl EP, the demolition of their rehearsal space, and the general indifference bordering on hostility of local audiences. The sleeve notes suggest individual members accepting the inevitability of extinction, rationalising that Fysisk Fostran had been of its time and was as such a success on its own terms. Its difficult to tell where they would have gone from here, so leaving this collection to stand alone as an act which was never followed, and perhaps could not have been followed. This will seem like hyperbole until you listen to this stuff and consider that barely anyone sounded like this in 1984 - sludge metal with something weird and slightly scary replacing the stoner element, he said still scrabbling around for a description that doesn't fall apart once the needle hits the next track.
Outstanding. I'll leave it at that.
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