How Swede it is (The Punk Years): Anti Cimex Part 3

Anti Cimex
Scandinavian Jawbreaker
Regain
Anti Cimex would like to remind you the recent rash of hardcore bands getting sleazy with a little Motorhead is no new phenomenon. Like late ’80s TSOL, these Swede punks were surreptitiously sliding some cock in with their rock on 1993 album Scandinavian Jawbreaker when the rest of us were girding up with flannel for half a decade of mopery.

“Braincell Battle” or “Only in Dreams” could easily be reckoned as Anti Cimex’s “Ace of Spades” as the band drifted even further from their humble d-beat roots to a verdant pasture of grime and debauchery.
No matter how debauched, though, Anti Cimex never wander too far from their punk roots. So classic Discharge is augmented with nihilistic ZZ Top boogie on “New Blood,” “Nailbiter’s” toasted gruyere horror film keyboards, or even by the surprising delicacy of “Pain (U Bring Me)’s” interlaced acoustic and electric guitars. Central to the album and its bipolar moods is the two part title track. “Scandinavian Jawbreaker Part 1” is a soccer hooligan of a punk tune that’s all pounding drums and scathing guitars while its sleazier twin, “Scandinavian Jawbreaker Part 2” is a biker bro hymn with a catchy “No chicks/Big dicks” refrain.
Anti Cimex’s DNA lurks in the genetic code of just about every punk band to call Sweden home and former band members can be found anchoring current stalwarts like Driller Killer and Wolfbrigade but the band’s influence can be felt even wider (as At the Gates' Alf Svensson, who contributed both album art and riffs to the punktastic “…Of Ice” can attest). Though I don’t think Scandinavian Jawbreaker is as strong or as thoroughly realized as predecessor Absolut Country of Sweden, it’s a vital transition for the worldwide punk scene, paving a greasy biker sound that is only currently being emulated by hardcore kids across the globe.

How Swede it is (The Punk Years): Anti Cimex Part 1

First up, you have no idea how excited this makes me. Regain Records, a label I tend to associate more with Euro death and old In Flames records than gutter punk glory, has snapped up three out of print Swedish crust classics by founding punks Anti Cimex and put them back in circulation. I have been peeing my pants with excitement about this since February when everything was originally slated to hit stores only to watch with dismay as the release dates got shoved further back and two previous orders were cancelled. Even when the release date in June came and went a couple of these albums were still trapped in back order limbo (the Wolfpack reissues that I wanted to include with this have been shoved back into August and I’m not holding my breath Regain will meet that date either). But oh, were the Anti Cimex albums ever worth every minute of kid-before-Christmas anxiety.
Swedish punk begins here.

Anti Cimex
Anti Cimex
Regain
This is ground zero for all of Swedish hardcore.
Anti Cimex, named for a pest control company, is the kind of band for which terms like crucial were coined. Short of the Ramones, Black Sabbath and Napalm Death, I’m at a loss to think of a band that has had a more profound impact on a musical scene. For those of us who can’t claim to own an original copy of the seminal Raped Ass EP (my excuse is I was four and living in the frozen hellscape of North Dakota at the time, which may explain my Swedish fetish, come to think of it), Regain has smartly reissued this collection of early works by the masters, the Rosetta stone of Scandi-crust.
This eponymous collection is Anti Cimex at the peak of their Discharge influence, Ds get beaten and the guitars can barely be contained by the cheap studio job. The early songs are a sonic safari of stampeding wildebeest drums being harried by the kind of rabid wasp guitars Unseen Terror would perfect. And all of that is just a pedestal to display Tomas “Freke” Jonsson’s vodka scarred crocodilian roar.
The songs all touch on the inspirational Brits’ wellworn themes on “Cries of Pain,” “Warmachine” and “Victims of a Bombraid” (or as Freke’s accent puts it, “weektims of a bombraid”). But even when Anti Cimex were beholden to Discharge (and to a lesser extent Amebix’s biker bar ambience), songs like “Smell of Silence,” with its Wayne Kramer freakout guitars, presaged the band’s incredible growth. The guitar trills and cymbal runs of the slow motion collapse of “Painkiller” already showed the kind of songwriting chops the band sprout later.
At time furious, hilarious and unexpectedly deft musically, Anti Cimex and contemporaries like Totalitar built on Discharge’s foundation, assembling the pieces that would become the Swedish punk of Disfear, Acursed, Avskum and a host of others.