The Stomachmouths - Born Losers LP

The Stomachmouths - Born Losers LP (Busy Bee Productions/Sweden)

They Say:

When the Stomachmouths began playing vintage American teen music in Stockholm 1983, they had no European predecessors. There had been a few new wave-era bands in Britain and Sweden that covered a Nuggets tune or two, but for those bands it was always part of something else. None of them had gone the whole nine yards and stripped away all alien elements from 1960s punk, like the Stomachmouths. The 1980s garage scene was created and has to be understood as a complete immersion in American pop culture from the 1950s and pre-hippie 1960s. It wasn’t about heavy fuzz guitars or tattoos, it wasn’t about wearing leopard skin pants and proclaiming a “revolution”. Everything like that just had to go. It wasn’t a retro scene either, because nothing like this had ever existed in Scandinavia. In this pure garage scene the Stomachmouths were undoubtedly kings. They were the best live band, they had been around the longest, they had the most developed sense for the right moves and attitude. Musically the band was top-notch, with no loose ends or weak links. Few would challenge the notion that the Stomachmouths spearheaded this scene because they took it so seriously, like a mission. – Patrick The Lama

Ugly Things/USA
The Garage Revival – or what ever you want to call it – of the 1980s was a mixed bag of nuts.Actually, let’s be honest, with some exceptions most of it sucked pretty badly. There was a distinct lack of imagination in the movement, and a lot of the music just seemed like a weak dilution – or a bad pollution – of the genuine article. Before to long the already milky waters of’ 80s Garage were clouded shit-brown as the poseurs and opportunists dived in with their weak hybrids: New Wave bands gone Garage, Punk bands gone Garage, Psychobillybands gone Garage, Mod and Power Pop bands gone Garage, Heavy Metal bands gone Garage, Goths and even New Romantics gone Garage – they were easy to spot and they invaribly missed the point completely. It was the 80s after all. But it wasn’t all bad. In Sweden, for example, there were a handfull loosely connected bands – the Crimson Shadows, the Stomach Mouths, the Backdoor Men and the Creeps – that not only captured the raw spirit of the Garage sound but also executed it with a degree of style and panache, elements many other bands seemed oblivious to at the time. Active from 1984-87, the Stomach Mouths, with their crazed interpretation of the American ’60s teen garage sound, were probably the wildest of this bunch. Fronted by lead screamer/guitarist Stefan Kery, they generated plenty of noise both onstage and in the studio, leaving behind a pile of vinyl releases, now difficult or near impossible to find. Compiled by Kery and released on his Subliminal Sounds label, Born Losers gathers the best of the Stomach Mouths output, along with live and unreleased tracks by the Mongrels and the Tonebenders. It’s a mad funfair ride, drenched in screams, sneers, fuzz, Farfisas and cheap reverb. And while every move and chord change is derivative of a thousand ’60s garage tracks, it really sounds nothing like the 60s at all, but rather some mutant bacterial strain of the ’60s Garage virus running unchecked and rampant. That’s really the heart of the Stomach Mouths appeal: rampant, unchecked, un-self-conscious teenage Garage band fun. /Mike Stax/Ugly Things