Unarmed Unarmed cassette
For some unfathomable reason, I completely missed out on this tape released about a year ago on Phobia Records in spite of my usually infallible and reputable crust detector (just imagine a punk version of Jiminy Cricket yelling in my ears whenever it spots a trace of crust music). I have of course long been familiar with Sweden’s UNARMED, pretty much the epitome of the typical ’90s Eurocrust style—or rather perhaps an era-defining take on the genre. UNARMED does exactly what you’d expect a common crust band to do between 1994 and 1999: old school raw cavemen hardcore music inspired by DOOM, 3-WAY CUM, HIATUS, or WARCOLLAPSE, done with Swedish taste and a bear behind the microphone. They are certainly not reinventing the wheel, and a full discography with no less than 28 songs will be hard for most to take unless you are as monomaniacal as I am. I love these kinds of projects because they play a crucial role in archiving and recollecting our collective history, to save it from oblivion, for posterity. UNARMED was never the most high-profile, the most talented, or the most remarkable among the legions of D-beat and crust bands during the ’90s, but I personally really enjoy the primitive and hyperbolic gruffness of their sound. This is for the real crust die-hards.
