STOMACH MOUTHS - DON'T PUT ME DOWN Considering the mix of primordial instinct, attitude, melody, sound… among my all-time favorites. IlConte
When Stefan Kéry formed the Stomach Mouths in the early Eighties, he was already a “seasoned” musician, despite his tender age.
He had already played as a drummer in the Red Baron at the age of 9 and as a guitarist and singer in the Pink Panthers, the Firebirds, the Dragonfly, the Dogwayst, and finally in the Rager Mar, which became the Stomach Mouths after Martin Skeppholm joined.
In the meantime, he had become an avid record collector: obscure psychedelic singles, folk, beat, rock 'n’ roll, R ‘n B, surf, hard rock, punk, garage, children’s songs, TV themes.
Everything that Swedish teenagers throw away for a few crowns, he buys back, listens to, and learns.
By the time the Stomach Mouths were born in 1983, he could play around a hundred covers.
Nothing extraordinary, but he knows how to play them the right way: with the peculiar urgency of youth, a mix of anger, sexual desire, frustration, and cynicism that also emerges from his vitriolic voice, tearing through the vocal cords as if they were the nylon stockings of a twenty-year-old.
It is this attitude that makes Something Weird an essential album in the history of neo-garage, a living, fierce, and sickly record.
Sixties in form, punk at heart.
It has the animalistic force of a saber-toothed tiger.
I Don’t Need Your Love, Don’t Mess With My Mind, Dr. Syn, Teenage Caveman, R&B n° 65, I Leave, Cry, Waiting, Down, Nightmares, Valley Surf Stomp, Coming Back Alive: with every bite, a piece of flesh jumps, the pulp of a muscle gets bitten, a bone gets ground, pierced, torn away.
And while the choice of Born Loser as a “filler” cover might seem obvious (but it isn’t, given the brutality with which the Stomach Mouths cover the Murphy and The Mob piece with acidic gastric juices, NdLYS), it is peculiar to include a version of a “domestic” song like The Cat Come Back, an old folk song from the previous century that Stefan keeps in his vast vinyl collection and that for years (we're talking about the pre-Wikipedia geological era) countless long-haired diggers will try to find in some obscure beat compilation, without finding a thing.
There’s something in my kitchen, I think it‘s alive, it’s growin’ in my sink and now it’s six-feet high.
Sweden had given birth to its All Black and Hairy: it was the zero year of the Scandinavian garage scene.
The Rev
