bidhardcore.com

Hail Sweden as they say… found 2 well known Käng-core treats. Mob 47’s eponymous 7″ e.p.has been recently released by Sweden friendly Havoc records in the USA (although this on is from an original pressing) and has generally remained through the years one of the better known Swedish hardcore releases in the United States. Having been featured on both Pushead’s Cleanse the Bacteria comp in 1985, and the P.E.A.C.E. compilation the year prior, as well as on a couple of BCT compilation cassettes (I think), they had fairly good exposure to the average U.S. based HC listener of the day. I think overall their sound is also maybe a little easier to identify with for people raised on your Minor Threats, your Negative Approaches, your Agnostic Fronts, as the songs keep a bit of a faster clip than your average “D-Beat” related release, and maintain brevity, similar to those bands (not that such a thing was unheard of with other groups of this style). Additionally, the riffs themselves are a tad more tuneful than your average Discharge worship, and I think that goes a long way in putting this E.P. in its rightful place, at classic status. Animal Liberation plays like a simplified take on Nothing by Negative Approach, at least to my ears, though the theme of the song is a much more straight forward political one that ought to be pretty obvious. Seems like an early instance of animal rights, at least as far as straight hardcore goes, and I wouldn’t doubt the members of Ripcord took note, among many others. One more thing I think is worth note in comparing it to U.S. releases from the same time period is the almost total lack of bass-guitar in the mix. I always associate extremely trebly, thrashy hardcore with the sound of early mid-west and east coast hardcore from the United States, and like this record, part of the reason for that is that the bass was nearly mixed off a lot of those records and demos. The record would not really change or sound very different if there was no bass player, which is a huge contrast to say Discharge (who are the obvious starting point for the sound of this E.P.), and while other bands from Sweden use the bass guitar to varying degrees of importance and prominence in their sound, I find it particularly neglected with Mob 47. If you’re not familiar with Mob 47 and have any interest at all in early hardcore from other countries, there are a few different comprehensive reissues out there which are cool but a little intimidating as they compile numerous demos and comp tracks. For that reason I think the best place to start would be the straight up reissue of this E.P. on Havoc. It’s affordable, very well distro’d, and nice looking too.

In some ways, the other side of the coin here is Anti-Cimex - Victims Of A Bomb Raid 7″also from 1984, and hardly relatable to USHC at all. Actually Victims, or Wictimsas pronounced in the title track, hardly even sounds like previous Anti-Cimex records and attempts to sheen a lot of the rough edges that those had. Where their previous record (and probably most legendary), Raped Ass (that’s Arse) has a sound centered around the overload of various distortion pedals and frequent cymbal crashes, this record seems like a pretty obvious attempt to refit the band to the sound of Discharge’s Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing. Now I know that’s kind of a “duh” revelation, but it’s a pretty big leap to take for the band itself. While I’m sure they thought this sounded rather professional at the time, it reeks of cheap processing and studio effects of the era, despite still being quite a classic. The snare drum is heavily compressed and gated so that it nearly sounds sampled (if you don’t know what I mean tap your computer mouse with your index finger a few times - it’s that sound), the guitars are much clearer and dipped in chorus as was the style at the time, and most everything has some reverb to make it sound bigger. Discharge themselves, somewhere around Why? or Hear Nothing, started using a chorus pedal on their guitars (in the studio anyway) to give them a “fuller” sound, and a lot of early 80’s hardcore records attempt to use this same trick, often to hide the fact that they only have a single guitar track on them (see: every record recorded in Washington DC after 1982). In addition there seems to be a more conscious attempt to display some kind of guitar playing “chops” with numerous noodling/string bend moments, and other pointless stuff. Or, maybe they just really really wanted to sound like Hear Nothing, complete with a string-bend to punctuate the riff every few measures. Probably both. You know, despite all that though, this is a brutal release, and even though it’s not the best, it’s still the second best Anti-Cimex release. I also think that through their entire career (maybe barring the sub-par Anarkist Attack) Anti-Cimex had a superior grasp on actually putting together a catchy song, rather than just a couple of heavy parts and stringing them together as a song, and that’s worth at least a tip of the hat.