Well, it has been a long time since I last wrote about Bob Malmström on our putrid site. The first time I encountered these Swedish-speaking Finns was back in December 2011 (here) after catching their official music video for a song called “Eliten”, which was a kind of searing, headbanging, thrash/hardcore/punk onslaught, as rendered by a bunch of dudes in suits sipping champagne. The second time was in April 2013 (here) when the subject was a lyric video for the title track from their album Punkens framtid, which rocked so hard it nearly knocked me flat, though I somehow kept my feet despite bouncing around in a solo mosh pit of my own making.

But now I have a new excuse to enliven our site with some Bob Malmström insanity, because they’ve just released a video for a cover of a song called “Du kan lita på mig” (“you can trust me”). The song was the title track to a 1993 album by a Swedish singer/songwriter named Tomas Ledin. After hearing the Bob Malmström version, I listened to the original. It’s a bouncy, catchy, pop-py bit of fluff (as heard by my ears, which are scoured to a bloody mess by a daily dose of extreme metal and can now barely tolerate anything bouncy and poppy). I much prefer what Bob Malmström have done with the song — and not just because the video includes a lot of coke, whiskey, boobs, more coke, and hilarious English subtitles. Continue reading »

Bob Malmström. That’s a band name. They’re from someplace called Westend in Finland. They claim to have originated borgarcore, which seems to be an abbreviation for bourgeois-hardcore. They are politically incorrect, in that they celebrate the enjoyment of things like eating meat, wearing furs, drinking copious amounts of Dom, lap dances, and making big piles of money.

In October, Spinefarm Records released Bob Malmström’s debut album, Tala svenska eller dö, which means “Speak Swedish or Die”. This has something to do with a linguistic minority group in Finland consisting of Swedish-speaking Finns. According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, “they maintain a strong identity and are alternatively seen either as a distinct subgroup of the Finnish people or as a separate ethnic group or even as a distinct nationality,” and they represent about 5.5% of the total Finnish population.

There seems to be some kind of continuing controversy over various government protections of the right of Swedish-speaking Finns to speak Swedish. Problem is, I can’t quite tell which side of this debate Bob Malmström is on. I found this Bob Malmström interview in Finnish, but as we all know, Google Translate does an especially piss-poor job converting Finnish into English, and the translation I get is mostly gibberish. So, I can’t tell whether Bob Malmström is protesting prejudice against the finlandssvenskar/suomenruotsalaiset or fomenting it — or just putting everyone on. Any Finns out there care to help me out?

Anyway, although this is all kind of an interesting aspect of Finnish culture that I didn’t know existed, it’s not the reason for this post. The reason for this post is the recently released official music video for a Bob Malmström song called “Eliten”, which has been rocking my ass this morning. It’s kind of a searing, headbanging, thrash/hardcore/punk onslaught, as rendered by a bunch of dudes in suits sipping champagne. Fuckin good pancake. Check it after the jump. Continue reading »