Vivisektio 1985 LP
Back in February, I had the privilege of reviewing VIVISEKTIO’s most recent album. It’s a great record and the band has a really fascinating backstory, which I won’t recount here but is worth checking into if you are even marginally interested in the intersection of Finnish punk and Trivial Pursuit. Listening to this material from the band’s formative period is like hopping into the most radical time machine back to 1985. The recording quality is all tattered edges, but the gold is in the grooves. Raw, raging, rowdy hardcore punk will always transcend fidelity as far as I’m concerned. Here, VIVISEKTIO sounds like a severely damaged KOHU-63 practice tape with any element of harmony extracted and fed to rabid dogs. Noisy, angry, and glorious. The record comes packaged with a full-color booklet that I presume enumerates the band’s historical significance, though I can’t say for sure since it’s mostly in Finnish (except for a reprinted MRR interview from 2015). A hidden gem of gnarly ’80s Scandinavian hardcore!