Review Summary: Experiment? That dog won't hunt, Monsignor.
I've always been a fan of the
Bourne trilogy of action movies. They feature Jason Bourne, an amnesiac who is trying to find out who exactly he is, and who he is happens to include being a nigh-invincible U.S. government assassin, who is essentially a master in everything your typical Hollywood secret agent should be a master of: martial arts, fancy driving, foreign languages, and immediately being aware of any potential threat in his immediate vicinity. That's really all there is to these three movies: Jason Bourne kicking everybody's ass all the time, never making any strategical errors or betraying any internal emotional weaknesses. Any potential for a character flaw, which can offer a good way for the audience to feel connected to him, is abandoned in favor of the rush one gets watching a true master of his craft at work without ever having to worry about whether he'll get caught.
And this is about where Skitsystem comes in. As some of you may know, Skitsystem was a Swedish crust punk outfit co-founded by At the Gates frontman Tomas "Tompa" Lindberg in 1994, one of many bands to come out of Sweden worshiping the almighty Discharge and their 1983 magnum opus
Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing. Bands from this scene can be identified first and foremost by the distinctive, relentless "d-beat" played by the drummer over and over again, in our case that drummer being Adrian Erlandsson. Add to that the other co-founder, guitarist Fredrik Wallenberg, and bassist Alex Höglind, and you get the line-up of Skitsystem we will concern ourselves with for this review. They immediately got to work creating some of the best crust punk around; not exactly deep or endearing, but kicking all kinds of ass with nary a misstep in sight.
We start off with their 1995 EP
Profithysteri. Really the only thing distinguished this period in time from the rest of the material to be found on here is a sort of mid-range gargling growl by Tompa, not far removed from a typical second wave black metal vocalist, which he thankfully drops rather quickly in favor of an extremely dynamic, uninhibited yell. The highlight of these first six songs is probably
När Ska Ni Fatta?, a great example of the Skitsystem formula: a simple but infectious distorted riff, with minimal, repetitive lyrics on top, a modest guitar solo to form a bridge of sorts between the second and third verse, all founded upon Erlandsson's insistent, relentless and rock-solid d-beat. These are the ingredients the band would come to rely on for the bulk of their material.
As I said earlier, the rest of this compilation can be described in much the same way with few exceptions, which leads to a potential bone of contention: one man's consistency is another man's monotony. There are a couple of samples from (Swedish?) war movies to break things up a bit, and the epic (relatively speaking, of course)
Krossa Mig features a slower dirge for its first half, but otherwise it's full throttle all the time; Jason Bourne mode, if you will. It can take a few listens to really be able to differentiate between the songs, but well worth it. You'll find the aforementioned
När Ska Ni Fatta? and
Krossa Mig, as well as the more rock-styled
Välfärd, the candidate for most likely to be heard on the radio (this is a purely hypothetical radio station of course)
System Collapse, a particularly dynamic performance by Tompa on
Jag Vägrar, and perhaps the minimalist riff at its most misanthropic in my personal favorite
Levande Lik.
There really aren't any songs I could call filler on here unless you're one of those that would find this "consistency" to be monotonous, when Skitsystem sticks with plan A they cannot seem to go wrong. There is nothing groundbreaking here, no cathartic epiphanies, just pure aggression, pure crust, all the time.
