Skiftande Enheter - 2019 - ST

Levande Begravd Records – LBR08

 A single-sided twelve-inch is an extravagant container for fourteen minutes of deliberately uneconomical punk. Half the record remains silent, while the playable side crams eight songs together as though Skiftande Enheter might be evicted from the studio at any moment. That physical imbalance fits the music perfectly. These songs are rough, impatient and slightly antagonistic toward the expectation that a proper record should contain more material, more polish or some grand explanation of itself. The unused side is not missing content. It makes the little eruption on the other side feel even more temporary, like graffiti sprayed across one wall of an otherwise empty building.

Skiftande Enheter emerged from a remarkably interconnected Gothenburg underground. Julius Pierstorff and Elin Engström also worked together as Monokultur, while Engström created her shadowier solo music as Loopsel. Hugo Randulv appeared in Makthaverskan, Amateur Hour and Enhet För Fri Musik, among other projects. None of that surrounding sophistication makes this record sound refined. The quartet deliberately returns to the practical discoveries of first-generation DIY punk: learn what the song requires, play it before self-consciousness interferes, and leave the useful accidents intact. Levande Begravd connected the record to Desperate Bicycles, crude 1960s garage and Sweden’s early punk compilations, but Skiftande Enheter do not sound like collectors carefully arranging references. They sound like those records have been absorbed into muscle memory.
“33” opens with a melody unexpectedly close to early American hardcore, but the performance is too loose and strangely buoyant to become macho. The keyboard needles the guitars rather than filling out the harmony, giving parts of the record the hostile carnival quality associated with the Mummies. “Fel på er” means roughly “something is wrong with you,” while “Vem bryr sig” asks “who cares?” These titles establish a vocabulary of accusation, alienation and emotional exhaustion without requiring elaborate manifestos. “Verklighetens klor,” or “reality’s claws,” may be the clearest statement of the album’s condition: everyday life is not merely dull but something capable of gripping and scratching. The brief songs respond by refusing to behave responsibly.
The group’s sloppiness is productive rather than careless. Drums push ahead, guitars arrive with frayed edges, voices strain against the melody and the keyboard sometimes sounds as though it belongs to another song happening in the next room. Yet the hooks survive every collision. “Ett djur,” “Idiot” and “Om du sett mig nu” have the economy of playground chants or private insults repeated until they become communal. The final “Jävla Rock’n’Roll” stretches past two and a half minutes, practically an epic here, and turns the album’s primitive method into a small declaration of loyalty. Rock and roll is not being defended as a respectable cultural institution. It is the troublesome noise still available when society, adulthood and good taste have all become impossible to tolerate.
Later in 2019, Snubblar genom drömmar revealed a more spacious version of the band, with jangling guitar, organ, post-punk melancholy and an acknowledged love of Felt and the Velvet Underground. Hearing that development can make this first mini-album resemble an early sketch, but its limitations are actually complete. The band did not outgrow these songs because they were unfinished. They discovered that the same directness could survive inside a wider musical language. The short punk bursts provided the skeleton; later records changed the clothing, lighting and emotional weather around it.
This self-titled record captures Skiftande Enheter before those possibilities had spread outward. Its world is square, irritating and full of people who cannot cope with it, yet the music responds with energy rather than defeat. Thirteen minutes are enough to create an identity, empty the room and leave the silent side of the record staring back. Anyone who heard the group during this early, scrappier stage may remember whether the songs became even faster or less stable live. The record sounds as though it was designed to survive through exactly those fragments of memory.