Over the last few years, we've been rubbish at updating the giglog. This is because it takes too fucking long. The thing that takes the most time is the photos. So now we post those photos on Facebook instead, and just do text here, ok?

Massgrav's first trip to France, and what a nice visit it was!

Froggy giglog

Two shows in three days - almost a tour!

Uppsala and Gothenburg giglog

Despite promising ourselves we wouldn't - we returned to Finland in the fall.

Finland 2019 giglog

Another trip to Holland - returning to Bloodshed after many years.

Bloodshed Fest giglog

A few years back, we played that festival they have in Gdynia.

Poland giglog

We went north to show them northeners how it's done.

Ostämman giglog

Massgrav revisits London, check it out

London giglog

The giglog returns with a tale of German adventure

Germany giglog

Finally another "tour" by train! See what happened:

Denmark/Skåne giglog

We love going east and Ukraine was no exception!

Ukraine giglog

Time to return to Germany yet again for a couple of great evenings in Frankfurt and Hamburg

Germany giglog

Sometimes we play on the other side of the globe, sometimes we just take the train a few hours north.

Sundsvall giglog

Just like Motörhead and the Ramones, we like playing in Brazil whenever we get the chance. Ok, so this was the first time ever, but still. Check out what happened the first time left Europe and flew to South America.

Brazil giglog

We played the 2nd edition of it and when it was time for the 9th, we decided to return once again to Play Fast or Don't in Czech Republic.

Czech giglog

England. Notorious for being a shit country to tour in. No food, no free beer, nowhere to sleep and very few decent venues,
forcing you to play in pubs, pay for everything and live in squalor. We thought we’d give it a go, just for laughs.

England giglog

Finally, we made it to the backside of Sweden; Göteborg

Göteborg giglog

We've been to Uppsala about a million times and WE LIKE IT! This was by far the bloodiest time though!

Uppsala giglog

We went down to a cold and gray Germany to play two gigs.

Germany giglog

Punk Illegal support gig

Karlstad giglog

Grundbulten, with Makabert Fynd and Glöm Dä

Stockholm giglog

Gig with a shitload of thrash bands in Nyköping

Nyköping giglog

Gig with Discharge, Makabert Fynd and 1.000.000 other bands in Linköping

Linköping giglog

Gig with Makabert Fynd and Tinner at Sugar Bar

Stockholm giglog

We headed north to play with Kol & Stål, Martyrdöd and Tormented

Sandviken giglog

After almost a year of not playing live, we went to Finland for some live destruction:

Finland giglog

Ok, so we went to Russia. A lot of stuff happened so we're gonna have to split this one into several parts. Here are the first ones:

Russia part I
Russia part II
Russia part III
Russia part IV

Here's the story of our first gig ever with Ove, together with Makabert Fynd, check it out!

It’s been a very long time since we played in our hometown Stockholm. Long enough that we decided to break the rules and actually set up a gig ourselves, which has never happened before. We arranged to have the classic venue Kafé 44 at our disposal and asked Sayyadina and the Åland Cunt boys in Tinner to join us. Unfortunately, the Tinner guitarist quit the band a week prior to the gig and we couldn’t be bothered to get another band in. Two bands are good too (and you get more money when you only have to split it two ways, right?).

We had no idea about whether anyone would be interested in a gig like this and Kafé 44’s legendary Tompa Eken seemed very nervous, hinting there wouldn’t be much people coming. So, it was pretty nice to have the place completely sold out at eight o clock or so, Tompa actually let in way more people than he should have, but I don’t hear anyone complaining.
Sayyadina took the stage first – I don’t know quite how they figured that, them being world famous grindcore stars, travelling the world in nightliners and us being… not quite as famous. Anyway, they put on a good show, playing their ultra complicated, intricate songs (one Sayyadina song contains enough riffs to put toghether a whole Massgrav EP) and then it was our turn.

We’d learned a lesson from the Uppsala gig and compiled a much more crowdpleasing setlist this time – lots of hits with a couple of new ones thrown it. People seemed to like it. A lot. Pretty soon, the room was dripping with sweat, you could literally see it running off the walls – maybe it happens all the time but I’ve only seen it once before there. Fun show, great crowd, we’d love to do it again in a couple of years, see you then!

Oh, one more thing. Our old Uppsala merch record was shot down in flames, we were pretty much cleaned out of shirts – thank you very much for supporting us, even if you just buy the shirt and download the songs.

SETLIST
01. Varför ska vi lyda?
02. Göran Perssons lögner...
03. Ursäkta röran vi suger kuk
04. Alla punkare e horor
05. Vägen till helvetet
06. Alf Svenssons huvud på ett fat
07. Vi skiter i Persson
08. Vad ere för fel på socialen?
09. Kuken står
10. Blåst på konfekten
11. Hatfylld och nerpissad
12. Ett korståg mot långsam käng
13. Arbetarklass
14. Skända flaggan
15. Mona Sahlin, fy fan
16. Sur och jävlig
17. Utan trosor i Tyrolen
18. Killar med liten kuk gillar grind
19. Socialdemokraterna
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Uppsala – again! We like Uppsala so no complaints, people are usually good to us there. We were a bit concerned though, communication with the guy who set up the gig was erratic to say the least and the line-up deteriorated from a great one, containing a number of awesome bands, to one containing only bands we'd never heard (or in most cases: heard of), Norse's other band Nice Idiot excluded. For quite a while, we were starting to think the whole thing was off but fortunately, we were wrong.
Since Norse preferred to travel with his more famous buddies in Nice Idiot, we all met up in Uppsala and started off by having a pretty decent Indian meal a few blocks from the venue (the gig food looked as appetizing as it always does, like somebody threw up in a giant aluminum pot). Stuffed within an inch of bursting, we walked back, since NI were due to play (maybe that's why they didn't move around a lot on stage – Indian food is dangerous that way, the famous Balti coma, you know). Anyway, Norse and the boys did their thing commendably, while the others manned the merch booth.
Then ensued a classic confusion that happens so often at these things. The band before us, Slöa Knivar, were late and were initially bumped 'til later, but then they showed up and were supposed to play their original slot, but since they had driven non-stop all the way from Skåne (that's like another country, a nine hours drive away) to play this gig for twenty minutes (lunatics!) they had to eat and rest a bit, which made sure nobody had a fucking clue as to when Massgrav was about to play. The band seemed like nice enough people, but the vocalist's outfit and dance routine turned the whole thing into some sort of joke we didn't quite get. Somebody mentioned Nina Hagen. In a way it was nice to see something different than the standard hardcore punk routine.

So, after that, we got on stage, plugged in and all that stuff. We had a very unusual set list this time, consisting of four acts:

1. The now usual intro of three fast songs that all start off with Norse screaming his head off.
2. Old and odd songs we haven't played much, or for quite a while.
3. Three new songs and a cover.
4. Hits and favorites you all know and love.

This turned out to be... not the best idea we ever had. Added to the abysmal on-stage sound (first time we ever had to restart TWO songs), we were struggling to get in our usual pace and it was clear that three new songs in a row was a bit too much for the audience. Anyway, halfway through, we switched to the list of all time favorites and things worked out ok in the end. Not our best gig ever, but they can't all be, right? Come see us again and we'll do better.

Oh, that's right, we were asked not to be so hard on Ungdomens Hus (the venue) this time. I won't lie, the sound on stage sucked hairy ass and maybe a bit more advertising would have brought more people, but apart from that, this is a great place and the people in Uppsala are very fortunate to have it. We even had time to do a bit of painting, as our "dressing room" was some sort of art room – great!

Setlist:
01. Göran Perssons Lögner - Svea Rikes Lag
02. Sur och jävlig
03. Hatfylld och nerpissad
04. Falsck Security
05. När ska massan resa sig?
06. Vi skiter i Persson
07. Mera bruk i baljan, boys
08. Vägen till helvetet
09. Mona Sahlin
10. Allt e skit (Skitsystem cover)
11. Blåst på konfekten
12. Ett korståg mot långsam käng
13. Jag vill också spela power violence
14. Skända flaggan
15. Varför ska vi lyda?
16. Nu blåser vi snuten
17. Ursäkta röran, vi suger kuk
18. Utan trosor i Tyrolen
19. Alla punkare e horor
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It’s a fucking wonder this gig ever happened. First, the fuckups who arranged it ignored our warnings that the airline tickets they’d agreed to pay for were going to get more expensive the longer they waited (I hope they’re happy about paying 2000 more for us than they’d have needed to) and then, four days before take-off, Norse manages to get stabbed in the center of his hand (in a gruesome street fight), rendering him unable to move two of the fingers on his left hand (you know, the one you use to play guitar, the complicated stuff). Being ultra tough, we went ahead anyway and after a few hours of delay and the usual abuse we always get from air hostesses, we touched ground in Umeå – home of the Swedish sXe movement, a crappy hockey team, rain, fog and wind and not much more.  

We were picked up in a car that should have been put out of it’s misery years ago, by a guy much younger than his car, but in the same state of repair - if you know what we mean. We dropped off our stuff at the venue (which had been changed two weeks earlier, not that anyone had told us or anything, but hey...) and found out that we were to play first, at eight. Ok, I guess it takes a real mastermind to figure this out but apparently the reason why we played before the local nobodys was that then everyone would show up early. Yeah, great plan. Only, it might have worked a lot better if anyone had thought of informing people about the schedule, say, the day before or so. Although this was a bit irritating, we didn’t really give a shit, as the room we were playing was so tiny that more people would just have meant more problems and more heat and also, this way we’d make it back to the hotel before the pool closed. Oh yeah, we were also told we’d get four sixpacks. Nice. Would have been nicer if they had been cold though, but hey... 

Our trusty driver, Mr crust as fuck, and his not so trusty car drove us to the hotel, so we could unwind and have a cold beer in the library, by the fireplace. We walked back to the venue, drank some warm beer and sold a few shirts and before we knew it, it was time to play. Sound was pretty bad on stage, we couldn’t hear any vocals, which always makes it really hard, but we solidered on as best we could. The crowd was more than big enough, before long we were sweating like pigs. Anyway, you could tell it was early, most people just stood there like statues (or maybe it has to be vegan and metal-ish for the umeå people to shake their asses to it, who knows) but at least we got them going when we played the Final Exit cover of "Umeå Hardcore".  

We packed up and grabbed a cab back to the hotel and threw ourselves in the pool. Well, not Indy, as the pool was for whites only (or maybe he’d assumed that the “hotel with a pool” was a joke and hadn’t brought any swimming gear, take your pick). We also did a few rounds on the gym equipment to let the muscles cool off slowly from the gig. Very nice. Unfortunately, we had to leave before long, as we were planning to catch AC4 and Moderat Likvidation at Scharinska, a much more fancy venue where the more mature bands got to play. The rain was pissing down so we called another cab – this was getting expensive. Ah fuck, I’m sick of writing, I’ll sum the rest up: 

• Totalt Jävla Mörker-Inge was the DJ and he made an ass of himself
• AC4 were pretty boring
• Moderat Likvidation... holy fuck, one of the worst crap bands we’ve ever seen and we’ve played with the bottom of the porn grind barrel, let me tell you.
• The beer was expensive and we stayed too late
• We walked all the way home, getting kebabs on the way. As this was Nåååååårrrlaaaaaand, that took about an hour (the kebabs, not the walk). Every time we tried buying food, it took fucking forever, even in McDonald's. Speed it up, lapplander fucks!

Next day was spent eating breakfast slowly, walking around the eyesore that is Umeå slowly, getting ripped off at the world's most expensive café and spending a few nice hours in the library, reading magazines before we flew home. 

To sum up, this wasn’t the greatest trip we’ve ever been on, but it’s always nice to see a new place and be able to check it on the “I will never move here unless someone holds a gun to my head”-list. 

Setlist:
01. Göran Perssons Lögner - Svea Rikes Lag
02. Sur och jävlig
03. Hatfylld och nerpissad
04. ...to be continued when I find the list...
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Uppsala, May 17 2008

This gig was sort of last minute, we only knew of it a week in advance or so – probably some other, better and more popular band cancelled or something.
We (along with Headed For Disaster and The Blinds) were to open for Annihilation Time (if you don't know them, they're US weed crusties from Cali who mix Sabbath-y riffs with punk rock and they're very popular with the kids) in the rehearsal space of the band Undergång. Seemed like a good thing, organized by good people and all that, plus Uppsala is always a super place to play – Uppsala loves Massgrav and we love Uppsala right back. However, as the day drew closer, things started looking bad. Ola had some family-related problems and was very uncertain as to whether he'd be able to make it to Uppsala. On the day of the gig, we still didn't know, so Norse and Indy went to Uppsala early to work on a backup plan. Together with Steffe and Martin from Diskonto they quickly formed GravKonto – a band playing both Massgrav and Diskonto songs. This was all very amusing, Norse playing the guitar, Martin the bass, Indy the drums ("Va? Vadå fyrtakt? Vad är det? Kan jag inte köra d-takt istället?") and Steffe handling the vocals, getting so worked up by the Massgrav tempo he sang all songs superfast and thus was finished when the rest of the band had a few minutes left to play. However, the world has yet to find out what that band sounds like, because at the last minute, Ola was able to hop into his car to join the others. As he was driving, the others had a fantastic barbeque at Steffe's place – sucks to be Ola! Thanks, Lisa!

We met up at Diskonto's rehearsal space (we were borrowing amps from them) and walked over to the gig). Headed For Disaster were about to go on (fortunatetly the singer had ditched his kilt and balaklava outfit this time) and the place was already like a sauna. Lots of people, lots of cheap beer but very little air. The Blinds were late so we agreed to go on second, happy to play as early as possible when people wouldn't be totally destroyed by the heat and humidity.
Uppsala feels like a second home to us, we met tons of people we know, most of them from there but also a good few from Stockholm and other places. Things were feeling good. Great venue, lots of friendly faces, lots of Massgrav shirts on people.

So we got onstage and started ripping through our rather short set and things were great! People moshed like crazy, stole the mikes repetedly, Steffe got on stage to do a soccer related chant... a good time was had by all, although it was insanely hot and sweaty. Again, one of our fave gigs.
Naturally, we hung out after the show, to talk to people and see the other bands (but we were too lazy to sell any stuff this time) but we all left before A.T. finished their set – as we say in Sweden: Det är ju en dag imorgon också.

Set list:

01. Ett korståg mot långsam käng
02. Hatfylld och nerpissad
03. Vuxenliv
04. Ursäkta röran, vi suger kuk
05. Sur och jävlig
06. Kuken står
07. Blåst på konfekten
08. Skända flaggan
09. Jävla fittor
10. Göran Perssons lögner, Svea Rikes lag
11. Arbetarklass
12. Utan trosor i Tyrolen
13. Va fan gör polisen?
14. Nu blåser vi snuten
15. Killar med liten kuk gillar grind
16. Spräckt skita i piketen
17. Umeå Hardcore (Final Exit cover)
18. Jag vill också spela power violence
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When you’ve just returned from a gig in Poland, playing in Linköping doesn’t feel like the most exciting thing in the world – sorry, but that’s the truth. Also, when the trip to Poland has left you a broken wreck, with a ruined throat, the cold from hell and other mysterious maladies, there are things you’d rather do than wipe the stale beer off your instruments to go play a headline gig at Skylten. As we drove south, it started raining. Once we arrived at Skylten, we got the classic punk welcome, where noone says ‘hi, I’m the guy in charge/the guy you’ve emailed with/the guy to talk to, welcome, put your stuff here, food’s over theree’ but rather you’re met with quiet hellos from a bunch of people who are all avoiding eye contact with you. Great. Anyway, soundcheck turned out ok after a while, it seemed like we’d be able to hear the vocals this time which made a welcome change from Poland.

Having seen what the food at the venue looked like (like puke on a plate, with peas added to it), we took off to look for pizza. In the rain. We found Linköpings worst pizza (it just has to be, or something is very wrong there) and ate it. We returned, took one look at the Henry Fiats-wannabees that were playing and went to set up the merch table – having picked up a huge box of new shirts from Daniel on our way south we had two different prints (available from the merch section) and we also had a few copies left of our new split 7” with WSBS plus the usual stuff so we were well stocked. Only, noone seemed to care. The onlyl people that approached us were the people who mistook us for the place where you payed to get in to the gig. We started to question our choice of hobby – what the fuck were we doing here?

However, once the band finished playing, people started trickling in and we actually sold a few shirts and a couple of guys talked to us. As two more bands played, we sold more and more stuff and we started to realize there were people who liked us here. In a slightly better mood, we entered the stage.

Now, in these giglogs, we always wrote stuff like ‘the crowd went ape-shit’ and ‘chaos erupted’ and we shouldn’t have done that – we should have saved all that for this giglog. Out of the blue, the rather small crowd of Linköping turned out to be a bunch of full-fledged psychos, aching to rock out to Massgrav. Before long, there was hardly room for us on stage, there were so many people falling and climbing onto it. Screaming and fist shaking galore and just when you started thinking ‘it’s only because they’re drunk’, you noticed they seemed to know all our lyrics. Fantastic show, complete mayhem and tons of fun. Words can’t do it justice, hopefully the photos will give you an idea. Once it was over, people bought even more shit, breaking our Uppsala merch sales record. What can we say, everything was great. Thanks to everyone who came to see us, see you next time!
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A couple of years ago, we got in contact with this Polish guy called Lipek for this or that reason. When we played Obscene, we met him and chatted a bit and later that year he emailed us to say he was arranging a festival, and would it be ok if he named it ‘Napalm over Warsaw’ after our ‘Napalm over Stureplan’ album? We said sure, but you’ll have to let us play there sometime. And, before the NoW II took place, we were already lined up for NoW III. Which is why we headed to Warzaw for a couple of days of Polish alcohol mayhem. 

Friday 
It all started oh so quietly. Since cheapo airlines aren’t good enough for us, we arrived after everyone else in Warzaw. The other Swedes on this trip were General Surgery, Mob 47 and a pack of crazed Massgrav fans who flew down to see us play and also to stay insanely drunk for three days straight (probably in the reversed order of importance, but what the heck). After dumping our stuff at the ‘hotel’ (a rather depressing eastern Europe hostel, but we weren’t gonna spend a lot of time there anyway (well, as it turned out, Norse would, but still...)) we let the taxi take us to Hard Rock Café. Now, HRC isn’t our prime choice of venue, but Lipek works there as a bartender and him and his co-workers took real good care of us, serving manly burgers and making dangerously strong drinks for us. The place was packed with Polish soft rock lovers, adoring the crappy Beatles cover band to death, while our little corner of not-so-soft rock lovers tried to ignore them and get hammered. The leader of our pack was definitely Norse, who kept a drink in each hand at all times, downing them like there was no tomorrow. Then the other Swedes showed up (let’s call them ‘Team Sweden’ henceforth to make things easy) and they’d been drinking since five in the morning and all of a sudden Norse didn’t seem so drunk anymore. Within a few minutes, one of them had picked a fight with one of the bouncers, which made Lipek very nervous. After taking care of the bill (which Norse didn't realise, he paid for his hundreds of drinks all by himself) Lipek instantly ordered taxis for the lot of us. The funny thing was that when they showed up, it turned out he intended for everyone to go home to the hostel. As it wasn’t even midnight, the toughest two thirds of Massgrav turned the offer down and joined Team Sweden for further drinking. Indy and the other bands went home to sleep. Wuzzes. The only person who stayed at HRC was Lasse, the guy who got us all kicked out. Oh, the irony. 

Warzaw is a weird place, very hard to get a grip on, especially when shitfaced. Also, the later it gets and the drunker you get, the harder it gets to find a place that will let you in. Countless mobster bouncers gave us a cold, hard stare and turned us away. Luckily, we’re good at finding weird bars that aren’t too particular so there was no risk of us running dry. To sum up the rest of the night, we hit a few weird places, got even drunker, we think we were kicked out of at least one place and we managed to talk our way out of further dealings with a couple of very serious Polish cops who objected to our friendly fistfight. Norse was drunk beyond belief and constantly tried to get someone to tell him the address of the hostel, but since no one thought he’d be able to make it home on his own, nobody gave him the address and he had to stick it out.  

Saturday 
As always, Ola got up early. After a shower and a trip to the local store for hair care products, he kicked Indy out of bed, but Norse was impossible to rouse so we took the tram into town without him. A day of sightseeing ensued – including highlights such as wandering the tunnels below the main drag, trying to find a McDonald's (there’s a huge system of tunnels, all crammed with little kiosks selling everything from body building drugs to shoes to jigsaw puzzles), being followed by weird street urchins all around the train station, a visit to the palace of culture (which Team Sweden had been thrown out of the day before for being naked on the top floor) and catching a movie at the multiplex cinema – perfect R n’ R for partied out rock n roll assholes like us. Throughout the day, we called Norse to get him to join us but all we got was excuses. Apparently, he didn’t move more than a few hundred meters from the hostel all day (however, he claims that let him see the REAL Poland, as he had lunch at some Polish dive and we had McDonald's food...). 

Anyway, come late afternoon, we were picked up to go to club Radio Luxemburg. At first we thought the driver was lost and needed a place to make a u-turn, but then we saw tons of drunk punks and realized the garage-like building in the middle of Warzaw wasteland, with no neighbours except a run-down sports stadium and a closed restaurant called MASH, was the venue for tonight. Pretty much the same old same old, merch booths and ugly people galore and not much to do except drink free beer and harass people. We met our Polish friend Andy, very nice to see him again – hopefully we’ll be able to do some stuff with him in the future, and we also talked to a few other familiar faces. Unfortunately, Radio Luxemburg only had one big room, so when bands were playing, hanging out with people (or going to the bar) was pretty much impossible). Team Sweden showed up just in time for our gig and we put on an OK show – could have been better if we had heard more of what we were doing but the crowd lapped it up and moshed like lunatics and we had a lot of fun. We tried to be advanced and start ‘Varför ska vi lyda?’ off with the intro to Mob 47’s ‘Dom ljuger’  but failed big time, won’t try that again! We did a handful of songs off the new album and people seemed to like them. No wonder – they’re great fucking songs! 

Once we were done, General Surgery were playing and then Mob 47 as the grand finale before the after party took over. Ola and Team Sweden went over to the adjoining fancy bar Pappa Grappa to annoy their other customers and be a general nuisance, the others stayed and watched the Swedes do their things. Once the after party started, we started exploring the hidden parts of Radio Luxemburg. It turned out you could open a door in the ‘backstage area’ (a storage room behind the bar) and get into a long corridor which would take you to one weird reggae bar the size of a toilet and some sort of disco club that were secretly located in the same building. The people in those venues seemed surprised to see us, but everyone was very friendly and nobody seemed to mind that you brought your own drinks, be it beer from another bar or moonshine in a plastic bottle. All the usual stuff and then some – Ola tried to tattoo his brother with a soldering iron, Dr. Carlsson fell asleep crammed in a broom cupboard full of guitar cases and once it was time to go home and about 4 hours before he had to go to the airport, Dr Sahlström decided to stay behind and talk to some girl with a husband in jail and a baby at her mom’s. Apparently he made it to the airport shuttle with minutes to spare and that’s all we know about that. What happens in Warzaw, stays in Warzaw (well, not really...). 

Going home day was its usual sucky self. Lots of juice drinking, lots of standing in endless lines at the airport and not much else to say about it. Thanks a bunch to Lipek and Szymon for having us, it was a fucking blast. 
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Ahh, the Netherlands! Land of tulips, clogs, prostitutes and drugs. Add a one day festival full of porn grind bands and we just had to go! Bloodshed Fest 8 in Eindhooven – fucking yeah!

As usual when we leave the country, we don’t go alone – seems there’s an insatiable need for Swedish bands around the globe. This time we travelled with Regurgitate and Norse’s other band; Nice Idiot (the other members are none other than Grind-Ove from Sayyadina, Jocke C from General Surgery and Micke van T from Fingerspitzengefühl – what a fucking super group!). Quite a band of clowns altogether…

The trip to Düsseldorf was pretty eventless – we were royally fucked in the ass by Ryan Air so no news there, Ove amused the line at the gate with lots of stories about plane crashes and what caused them and we had to stand in line for a year or so. Boring.
We were picked up by a couple of mini vans and everyone struggled to get the driver that didn’t seem too fucked up on dope and then we drove across the border to Holland using the smallest roads ever, totally convinced that our hosts must have had tons of drugs in the car – nobody but a smuggler would have used those shitty roads. Anyway, we made it to Eindhooven alive and were greeted by Luc, the guy in charge – a nice guy who also sings in FUBAR, but hey, no hard feelings (check the Obscene Extreme giglog for that story...).

The venue was weird as shit, apparently the Dynamo festival has too much money so they built this gigantic building in central Eindhooven with three stages, bars, offices and stuff, very professional! After a crap sandwich and a quick look at our ‘dressing room’ (a completely empty room, not one single piece of furniture, but still, it had a lock on the door so it was way better than a lot of other places) we were told that both Nice Idiot and Massgrav were to play slightly earlier than planned since some other loser band were stuck in traffic (don’t you hate it when some fucking nobodies pretend to get delayed so they’ll get to play late even though no one has heard of them and nobody cares about them?). So we fucked about for a while, checked out the merch market (porn grind heaven – what is wrong with people who are actually into crap like Cuntgrinder, Cliteater, Gonohorrea Pussy, Prostitute Disfigurement and misogynistic bullshit like that? – spotty virgin toughguys the whole bunch of them) and drank some of the crappy beer.

Nice Idiot went on stage about eightish and did a great show. Their old school HC sure made a nice change from all the grindcore that night and people seemed to enjoy it – very good reaction from the crowd for a band that nobody’s heard before.
Dinner was vegetarian of course, but still a lot better than average – very tasty wok with a bite – lose the tofu and add chicken and it would have kicked ass. More waiting, meeting up with people like Sandro from Regurgitated Semen and some dutch fans, but for some reason Every Day Hate-Andy never showed up (you were on our guestlist, man!), and then it was time to unleash some Massgrav hell on the unsuspecting victims of Eindhooven.
We played the smaller stage, which suited us fine, perfect size and the bar was close. We had some intense fucking spotlights blinding us so we couldn’t see much of the crowd but they seemed to lap it up and mosh like idiots so they probably liked it. We did a few new songs from the upcoming album and also played some forgotten favorites, great set-list. Norse claimed it was one of our best shows ever. Pretty close anyway. Damn good crowd!

The rest of the night was spent partying hard in Holland. Except for a brief visit upstairs to check the Regurgitate boys do their stuff in a grand style (headlining cocky fucks), we stayed in the downstairs bar where some idiot DJ played nothing but thrash metal to Norse’s everlasting delight.
A sure sign that Norse is drunk is that he starts buying even more merch than usual, so when you saw him on the dance floor, wearing a Blood I Bleed *and* a Yacopsae beanie, moshing all alone to some forgotten Kreator song, you knew it was going to be a long night.
Various members of the various bands enjoyed the dutch pleasures of the night until everyone was ready to drop. We dumped our stuff at the hotel and Norse managed to disappear so we said fuck him and went for döner kebabs – the blessing of mainland Europe! After a gigglefest at the kebab parlor, we finally came back to the hotel (where we found Norse snoring like a baby) and crashed, only to have the morons of Dead Infection come in and turn on all the lights and yap in ugly Polish for fucking hours, loud as hell, keeping most of us awake. Sucked to be them though – we’d taken all the sheets and pillows.

Sunday morning.
Norse woke up and started complaining about how everybody had just disappeared the night before. When the rest of us headed for the shower, it became apparent what had happened to him the night before: he had tried to have a shower. We’ll spare you the details…

The drums. The drums! As we went for breakfast, we noticed there was crazed drumming outside the hotel. There was also a fucking shitload of people in the streets. Ok, Eindhooven Marathon was on, great. Nothing like a folk fest when you’re hungover. We walked around town best we could (every two blocks you had to try to cross the route of the marathon), drank lots of coke (except in Holland, that fucking drugs nest, you can’t order a coke, you’ll have to say Coca Cola or they’ll look at you funnily and think you mean cocaine. Yeah, like we try ordering cocaine over the counter at a kebab joint, you fucking moron) and ate more kebab.
The trip home was the same old same old, the only thing that brightened the day was the security nazi at the airport, who – when returning Ove’s stuff to him after x-raying it – said something like “wallet, glasses, belt and… death to false metal”. Apparently, he knew how to spot a fellow Manowar fan.

So, to sum shit up, we had a great trip. Very well organized festival, nice people and stuff like that. If you get a chance to play there – go!
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Diskonto-Steffe put together a little extravaganza of fast and old bands for
the good people of Uppsala to enjoy and asked us to be part of the package. It was to be a repeat of the Blaze release party back in April 2006; Massgrav, Diskonto and Mob 47, so we actually were the young and fresh band (not counting Diskonto-Rikard) this time.
For once, we decided to take the train and stay the night, since we played in a bar and Steffe promised he'd host a party after it closed. Not only were we playing in a bar, it was a fucking franchise sports bar (O’Learys!) with gazillions of monitors showing sports, with jocks and rednecks aplenty. Perfect.

Sayyadina-Andy and Anton Blasphemy kept us company on the train. We were met by
Steffe, Rikard and Relapse-Greg and his girlfriend Megan and had to walk over to the bar. We tried hailing a cab but Steffe forced us to walk since it was only two blocks. Tree-hugger!
Once we got there the tree-hugger turned into Hitler. Apparently, Steffe doesn't like being in charge much. As he was the one who had set up the whole thing, a few questions about whether there was a backstage room and what deal had been made about beer for the bands were put to him, which made him flip totally. Redfaced, smoke coming out of his ears, screaming everytime someone asked something. Hilarious. We kept telling people "could you ask Steffe about..." and "I wonder how this is supposed to be, could you ask Steffe" and it worked every time! Lots of smoke coming out of his ears this evening.

The Mob 47 guys showed up in their new dress code (you either need to wear a Mob 47 shirt or one of the new Skitsystem shirts - cute!), and we tried to locate the stage. The place was pretty big.
The customary coma where nothing happens except everyone tries to avoid being the first band to soundcheck slowly turned into actual soundcheck (we went first) and the sports loving people at O'Leary's slowly started figuring out something was wrong (they normally don't have bands playing there). As Indy started checking the drums, hitting the same tom over and over, a guy came over and asked us to keep it down as he was trying to watch soccer.
We did a couple of extra songs for him at the end of soundcheck.

As ten o'clock rolled around, the place had filled up with the normal kind of degenerates that normally show up when we play, lots of old and new aquaintancies. Apparently 187 people payed the entrance fee! Not bad at all.
We hit the stage hard, opening with "Det är svinen som styr" this time. Unfortunately, we were halted after about three songs, when a fuse blew and nothing but the bass amp got any power. Great, we got to stand around looking even more like idiots for TEN fucking minutes while the sound guy bozo did fuck all and the (already pretty drunk) Diskonto guys fixed the problem. Thanks!
Once we were sort of back on track, Ola and Johan had to share a mike for two songs, which really didn't work that well. Apparently, it looked so hilarious, Indy almost fell off his drum chair laughing at the two maniacs running around on stage trying to get a hold of the mike.
The last half of the gig went well though, we did quite a few new ones, people sang along to the old ones, there was so much broken glass you expected GG Allin to pop out any second and people did wierd shit like backflips and push-ups as a way of displaying their affection for us. Whatever blows your hair back, I guess...
Funny gig, though, and people didn’t seem to notice or mind all mistakes we made due to the non-existent sound on stage.

As Diskonto handled the difficult task of entering the stage after Massgrav fantastically, we busied ourselves with getting as drunk as possible, talking to all kinds of weirdos and catching parts of the Diskonto and Mob 47 sets.
Diskonto was truly amazing and finished their set with the godly “Misery” by the godly band Bastard. They mostly did stuff from the Blaze split, which is fine by me.
Mob 47 was good as well, probably their best gig so far counting how many times I’ve seen them. The cover of Discard’s “Death from above” raised some wild chaos on stage. The best part must’ve been when Diskonto-Steffe started some football chant and the whole crowd joined in. (It went something like this, replace Sirius with 47...)

In the end, the vast amount of beer that was consumed even brought the bar owners around to liking us, despite the fact that he probably had to replace about half of his beer glasses. As the bar closed, people piled into taxis and headed over to Steffe's place. A very upset Ola (convinced that someone had stolen his bass and his bag (Indy had them all the time, to keep Ola from losing them)) had to be escorted out by the helpful bar staff.
Back at casa Steffe, everyone settled in and continued drinking and stuff. Somewhere along the way we picked up a naked guy carrying two bottles of vodka and someone manufactured some kind of smoking device out of a coke can.
From here on everything is pretty much a blur. Somehow Massgrav ended up at Diskonto-Martin’s palace in the middle of nowhere. We spent the night listening to Gauze and Waylon Jennings until six in the morning.
Sunday morning meant vegetarian meat (?) and eggs. Good stuff! And then an hour long wait for the cab to arrive. Old school.
Back home in Stockholm everything was about Randy Couture and UFC 74. Perfect.

Big thanks to Steffe for the gig, the bands, the people who attended the show and so on. Special thanks from Indy to Jugga for being such a nice guy, driving my drum gear back and forth.
Cheers!

PS. If you’ve got photos, feel free to mail them to us, and maybe they’ll end up here somewhere.
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As you may or may not know, certain obstacles (well, mainly just one) have prevented Massgrav from doing much of anything lately, least of all play live. But good things come to those who wait – the christian idiots got that much right – and we choose to make our triumphant comeback to the stage at the "Ta livet i dina egna händer"-festival in Sandviken. Since we got delayed picking up the new bullety shirts from Daniel Banner, we had to haul ass big time to get to Sandviken in time for the Diskonto gig. We made it just in time and they put on a great performance in spite of the pretty thin and boring crowd. You could tell these guys have recently toured the states, theatrical entrance and exit and lots of cool moves.

Apart from the Diskonto guys, lots of people we know were there, the Sayyadina boys, some of the Gadget guys, Infanticide and Assasination people and others, so the wait to go on stage was nice. The sun was shining and security and regulations were comfortably lax – bring your own beer and drink it where ever you want. Unusual for Sweden to say the least! We were supposed to use Diskonto's amps, but since Steffe and Martin were drunk when picking up the gear, they'd mistakingly brought a rack tuner instead of the bass head, so we had to use an old Peavey Centurion that was just sitting there anyway.

Around ten thirty or so, we entered the stage and unveiled our new, dazzling look (though only Diskonto-Rikard seems to have noticed) and ripped through a fistful of old and new songs - two brand new ones that no one had ever heard before: Ursäkta röran, vi suger kuk and Gud förlåter, inte jag. The Sandviken kids went apeshit (we think, we had a few major league spotlights blinding us so we couldn't see shit) and we lost half our weights in sweat (which, to Indy is like half a cup and to Ola is a fucking bathtub), messed up a few songs, but that's to be expected, and had a pretty good time.

After the gig, we hung around long enough for the sweat to dry and then we headed home. It's a pretty long drive, especially when you don't drive ambulance style like we did on our way there. So, not much to write home about, we all stayed pretty sober, nothing broke, no one got hurt and there's not much more to say except we're back in business so get in touch if you need a loud, fast and dirty band to play at you party, funeral, whatever.
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Kafé 44, Stockholm, November 28, 2006
Writing a giglog about a gig in your own hometown on a Tuesday night is something only a complete retard would do. So, here we go.

The dirty old men in Principles of Existence kindly asked us if we wanted to play with them at Kafé 44. Being the assholes we are, we accepted and then let them do all the hard work involved – setting up the gig, designing, printing and distributing posters and flyers and also lugging the backline.
We’re evil masterminds!
Anyway, as Tuesday night came around, we leasurly strolled over to Kafé 44 (which, for those of you not from Sweden, is a legendary punk live venue where tons and tons of bands have played over the years – non profit, no age limit, no alcohol) and did soundcheck. For once, things actually sounded good (well, the bass sound sucked, but at least we could hear each other, which doesn’t happen very often).
A quick detour to Norses bachelor pad for beers before returning to set up our very rock
star-esque merch table, at which we had no less than five different t-shirt prints (never you mind that we only had one bullet shirt left (and that was already spoken for) and only three bulldozer shirts), CDs and for once we even remembered to bring the vinyl stuff. Some mohawkes, stud-covered ultrapunks amazed us by buying the “Alla punkare e horor” (all punks are whores) shirts. What do we have to do to repell these people?
As we were cashing on in the poor punks Tortyr from Finspång (great name!) roamed through their set and were really good. Like a raw version of Skitsystem.
After PoE got off stage, we assembled our stuff and unleashed hell, Massgrav style. We chose to open the gig with “Alla punkare e horor” since it contains a lot of insults against the Kafé 44-punx. I don’t know if it was the fact that Norse had some of his crew film the gig (3 cameras!) or something else, but we were friendlier than ever to the crowd, almost jolly. We tried to be
showy and professional by sticking several songs together, but it ended up almost killing us. Two is ok, but playing three Massgrav songs in a row without a breather in between is fucking hazardous to your health and several band members got very close to passing out. Anyway, we did a crowd-pleasing bunch of new and old favourites, got off the stage, got back on and did three encores and then got the fuck off.
A few weird things happened: we got to sign a shirt for some guy from Ukraine (and a note from some very young Swedish “fan”), all our set-lists were spoken for before we even got on stage and last but not least – when we tried to give the first opening band – Tortyr – more money than us, since they had to shell out for gas, they refused since they were the opening act and we were, apparently, the “main act”, with the words: "You are Def Leppard and we’re only Bon Jovi." Okaaay?
Indy was totally overwhelmed by the fact that a member from the almighty Count Raven was there thanking us for a great gig... Holy shit! Indy's been listening to "High on infinity" ever since.
Nice gig, thanks to all the guys in PoE for setting it up and being nice guys.

Read a review of the gig here.
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Pub Bastun, Åland, September 30, 2006
In between Sweden and Finland lie the shitload of little islands - and a few bigger ones – that are Åland. It’s a pretty weird place because a) it’s part of Finland but it’s still autonomous in a lot of ways, b) it’s part of Finland but everyone speaks (weird) Swedish, c) the place is a time-trip back to the seventies (more later) and d) even though hardly anyone lives there, lots and lots of good bands play there. It was time for Massgrav to go there and find out what the fuck is up in the middle of the ocean. 
The d) reason - all the bands that play there - is easily explained. Åland has the fantastic venue Pub Bastun and they have Grulle, who gets bands there and (if we understand this correctly) pays for them out of his own pocket (it is rumored that all people on Åland are filthy rich, because of some old deal that gave them all stock in the Viking Line ferries). Anyway, Grulle is an ace guy who we met at OEF and we started talking about taking our rock n roll extravaganza show to Åland. And so we did. And we brought Regurgitate with us, sort of. Ok, no more intro, here’s what happened: 

Since we’d be getting free beer, we’d coaxed none other than mr Grind-Ove of Sayyadina fame to drive our rental van for us. We got all our shit together and headed for the ferry. The drive was eventless and filled with second-rate eighties metal. Worried that we’d miss the ferry, we naturally got there an hour and a half too early and got to sit on a very deserted parking lot with nothing but three Åland alcoholics to look at (one of them very nearly backed his car into our van though we were the only other car in the place – we shouldn’t have been that hard to miss…). Once the boat showed up, it turned out to be pretty small and shitty. We left Norse in the kids playroom and headed for the tax-free shop and the bar that had a “trubadour” (that’s swedish for a jackass with no talent who has a guitar and sings crappy Bob Marley and Creedence Clearwater Revival songs – very popular around here!). Not much else happened on the boat really.  
We arrived in Åland, passed the customs without having our rectums examined, arrived at Pub Bastun and hooked up with Grulle. Bastun is a nice place. Even nicer was the beer that awaited us backstage – Grulle had made labels for Massgrav and Regurgitate beer – a welcome change to all the people who think a paper plate of cold pasta makes for a good welcoming. The boys in Regurgitate had arrived earlier and had already drank most of their beer and gone to sleep so it took us a while to kick them into action and get them to soundcheck. Soundcheck sucked! Everything sounded like shit. Same old same old, I guess. We gave up and went for food. Now, this is where the flashback to the seventies really kicked in! At nine pm on a Saturday night, there seemed to be only one restaurant that still served food. All the pizza places, all the fast food joints and the rest, closed at eight or possibly nine. What the fuck? Get with the program!  
Anyway, we found the very stylish night club /restaurant Dino's where we raced a Finnish lady floorball team for seats and beat them. Burgers and beer all around! I don’t know if it was because their drinking earlier in the day or if it was just due to them being old guys, but Regurgitate were really slow drinkers, we had to wait forever for them to finish their beers, even Indy drinks faster than that! Speaking of Indy, we tricked him into paying for all of us and left Dino’s. Little did they know they hadn’t seen the last of us! 

We headed back and hung out with all kinds of Ålandians or whatever the fuck they’re called. Amongst others, we met up with Johanna – our biggest fan in Åland, who tattooed some of the lyrics for "Ett korståg mot långsam käng" around her ankle. More people should get Massgrav-related tattoos, it makes us feel very important. We had planned on giving her a shirt or something, but being the assholes we are, we completely forgot. Sorry.
Around midnight, Bastun started to fill up with people and half an hour later, we entered the stage with Indy being sick as fuck having a vomit bucket alongside of his drums and Norse starting to lose his voice... The usual old chaos erupted and we kicked the shit out of our set, did a couple of songs from the upcoming EP and lots of old favourites. To the crowd’s disappointment, we forgot to do "Kuken står" (apparently they had practiced the sing along bit at the end and felt very let down when they didn’t get to show it off – sorry, maybe next time!) Pretty peaceful gig, not much insulting going on and very little hostility from the crowd, pretty nice for a change. 
We finished up and Regurgitate got on stage and played about two million songs. To begin with, it was really really really really really really good. Jonken from Uncurbed (and Dellamorte and a bunch of other now defunct bands) did their first gig with them ever and did an awesome job and added a lot of visual coolness to their appearance (Rugge ordered him to wear his bullet belt at every gig henceforth). About five thousand songs into their set though, a lot of people seemed to feel enough was enough and more and more people made for other venues. As soon as RGTE were done and we had loaded the van, so did we. 

Dino's! Yes, again! We’d heard rumors of “rock karaoke” and cheap beer, so we went back. Unfortunately, the karaoke was about to close and Grulle was only able to pull enough strings to get them to play Eternal Flame by The Bangles as the last song (very much his choice) and somehow Ola ended up on stage as well, though very little singing was heard from him – it was mostly rude gestures and screaming. Not much else happened – we managed to liberate a bull horn, rearranged some furniture and left for the boat just as the staff seemed to decide they’d had enough of us, great timing! The rest of the night – the waiting for the boat on a deserted dock and the trip home – and the morning after were very eventless and who cares about eventless stuff? Anyway, now we know what Åland is about. Good place for 24 hours of madness, crap place to live. Next.
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Obscene Extreme Fest, July 13-16 2006
Playing the Obscene Extreme Festival in Trutnov, Czech Republic, is one of the things you have to do when you’re a band playing extreme and brutal music and we’re no exeption. We tried to go last year but it was not to be, but this year we were both asked to go and able to come, so we did. Here’s what happened:

Thursday
Morning flights kinda suck and this was no exception. We got up so early there was just no point in going to bed. We’d have to pay for this later though...
The flight was pretty eventless and we arrived in Prague as expected. We were supposed to wait in the airport for three hours and hitch a ride together with the Colombian death metal band Internal Suffering (jeez, would someone please tell them that just changing internal to infernal would make their crappy name at least a bit less crappy, ‘cause we forgot to) so we headed for the bar and started chugging grossly over-priced beer like there was no tomorrow. After three hours, our driver (who spoke close to no English) showed up, but no colombian death squad... We waited. And waited. After two hours, we finally coaxed the no english-guy into asking whether the band was even on the plane, which – of course – they weren’t.

Now, let’s ask ourselves a question here: say you’re a Colombian death metal band on your way to a festival gig in Europe and your flight is cancelled. What do you do? Do you call the organizer of the festival OR do you call one of your girlfriends and ask her to send an email? Guess which one these bozos did? Guess how much time a guy who’s in charge of a festival can spare to check his email on the opening day of the festival. Kids, take warning, this is what too much of that Colombian snow up your nose will do to your brains. Anyway, I digress.
We stocked up on beer and chips and headed for Trutnov, leaving the Colombian crackdealers behind. The nature was stunning and the beer was cool and pretty soon we were scaring our driver with our crappy singing. Short, pointless sidetrack: when we got in the car, the driver somehow managed to convey that we had to wear seat belts because the cops were really bad. The interesting thing though was that there were only three working seat belts in the entire car. Go figure...

After hours of driving on shitty but beautiful Czech roads, higher and higher into the mountains, drinking and screaming along with anything that was playing on the stereo (an interesting thing; Indy finally came out of the closet and admitted to being a country music fan – no surprise when the theme from Smokey and the Bandit was playing), we got to Trutnov and our luxurious hotel, Pension USVIT. No hot water, threadbare carpets and holes in the sheets but what the fuck, we weren’t gonna spend much time there anyway (though hot water would have been nice).
Since most of the day had disappeared while we waited for the Colombians, we wasted no more time but headed for the festival. Nice open air park that seemed to be an outdoors cinema originally (great idea that for some reason seems to have been huge in the eastern block). Tons of grind fans milled about and the stage was being built. Since there was nothing much to see, we only hung around for a few hours before going for food in the city centre and... finally the long day of beer drinking got to us. Ola fell asleep face down at the table (causing some mild embarassment to the rest of the band) and the others felt pretty much the same. We called it a day.

Friday
After a freezing shower, we walked over to the very convenient convenient store next door and bought breakfast stuff (mainly tons of different kinds of salami and some juice) that we ate in the park. The plan was to take a bus into the mountains and cross the Polish border on a mountain peak but we were thoroughly outsmarted by the Czech bus time table so that never happened. Major fucking disappointment! Instead, we moped around Trutnov, laughing at the clusters of grindcore fanatics that moved around town, most of them looking identical in long hair, camo pants and gore splattered longsleeve shirts. We checked out the local military store with tons of nice stuff that is very much illegal in Sweden and then placed ourselves strategically at a stylish café in the main square, eating expensive desserts and sipping fancy drinks.
When in Trutnov, don’t try the Dragon’s Blood (any coctail based on Fernet is bound to taste like shit but this one exceeded all expectations). Oh, and don’t expect them to be able to mix a Mai Tai…
Once we’d have enough to take the edge off the disappointement, we walked over to the festival and spent the rest of the day drinking glögg and watching (with a few exceptions) horribly bad grindcore and death metal bands. But before that, we spent quite a while checking out the merch section in the metal market (Norse went into crawl mode as usual and did three laps in a pace so slow he seemed to never move, and naturally he ended up spending a small country’s national debt on CDs) where we caught up with a few internet friends and a few new ones – the Selfmade God people, Lipiek, Esse Bloodshed, Grulle & Julle, the Greeks and also Andy who’s in charge of the popular Polish “Ärans och hjältarnas Band” Massgrav shirts (he must have made a fortune off those this weekend) and… Pjotr Pjinks!!! Fuck knows how it happened but Norse suddenly recognized a fat Polish guy as the man who sorted out our Polish tour way back when. (It’s time for a confession here: there was never a fan club on the rise in Poland, we were just making fun of Pjotr, but he was in charge of the trip – that much (but little else) we do remember.) Ola had no recollection of what the guy looked like and as for Pjotr himself, he didn’t speak much English but he finally nodded his conscent to remembering lugging us around in a miserable haze of drug abuse and chaos. Indy, who wasn’t around in those days, was greatly disappointed not to be able to coax some great tour stories out of the big, silent man.

The rest of the evening is pretty much a haze, but we remember Skitsystem showing up, Wallenberg with his 8 week old daughter on his belly. That poor kid will be scarred for life. Lots of time was spent in the backstage bar where the beer was plentiful and the food looked and smelled like vomit (we have no fucking clue what it tasted like - one look at it, and we gave away our food tickets).
Cripple Bastards amazed Indy and Norse (Ola hates everything that comes out of that shithole that is Italy). We also went for pizza in a place where the knives looked like black metal props and you could get Ermine on the pizza. Norse stayed up late to see Pretty Little Flower, while others crashed and burned a bit earlier than expected. Naturally, Norse got lost trying to walk home by himself and had to spend a good portion of the night in the city park, which he claims was very nice lit in various colours. He made it back home before morning though.

Saturday
Gig day. Since drinking too much turns us from a steamroller of hatred and power to a bunch of confused old ladies, we try to stay as sober as we can before gigs. Norse is known to freak out completely after a drink too many, playing the songs in new, creative ways, changing the setlist as he goes along and telling the crowd they’re the best, ever. So, we had a loooong day ahead of us, especially Ola who’s an insomniac and sleeps 3 to 4 hours a night and got up at six in the morning (and mistakingly tried the hotel breakfast which turned out not to be complimentary).
With little else to do, we hung out at the festival, did another few slow laps at the metal market, checked out some bands, met Glenn Sykes (General Surgery and Regurgitate) and his family, the Blockheads guys and lots of others and waited. We also had the pleasure of seeing the singer of World Downfall piss on his friend’s feet. For a long time, gallons and gallons of it. Germans…

Back into town for a nice dinner, where Norse ate the lizards spine and then to the hotel to pick up our stuff. Our gear was then securely locked into the basement of the backstage bar, to which only one guy had the key – very safe. Only… two hours later when we needed our stuff to go onstage, that guy was roaring drunk and had lost the key. “Don’t worry” he said, “the door is open”. Great. Except, the door wasn’t open and noone could find the key. With just minutes to spare, the key was retrieved and we got our shit and got up on the stage, only to discover that the idiots that played prior to us – Fubar – had broken the guitar amp. This, combined with the complete retards that were in charge of sound, ensured the entire gig sounded like shit. We couldn’t hear eachother one bit, there was no guitar to be heard by anyone and little vocals. Complete and utter crap gig. Norse was pissed off beyond all limits and didn’t even insult the audience much. Despite all this, the audience lapped it up and moshed like lunatics. If the sound had been good, this would have been an awesome gig because the crowd sure did their part and there were lots of them.

Anyway, we finished up, calmed down, sold some merch and posed for photos like bigshot stars, caught a few songs each by Driller Killer (who sucked ass) and Skitsystem (who were really good) and started in on the booze again, in a more serious way. Another one of those hard-to-remember nights, but lots of nice people, lots of beer and all the usual.

Sunday
It’s totally unbelievable that a whole day can be wasted on travelling home and feeling shitty. We had to go with Cripple Bastards to the airport and they insisted on listening to new Bathory albums (what the hell?!) and had the windows rolled down instead of turning on the AC. Maybe they don’t have air conditioning in Italy. They probably think they don’t need it since they didn’t invent it themselves, and stick to shit like gondolas, bribery and porn actresses with mustasches instead. Who knows.
To top things off, we had to share the airplane with a whole bunch of mentally challenged kids that sounded like a fucking apehouse all the way back to Sweden. Oh, the sweet life of rock’n’roll stardom!
Anyway, Obscene Extreme was cool as fuck, hopefully we can go again sometime and show those grindcore fan-boys what we sound like on a good day.
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Knivsta and Uppsala, June 3rd 2006

Since we'd tried playing two days in a row, we thought we'd try playing twice in the same day. None of these things may seem very taxing, lots of bands play for 50 days in a row when on tour, but you've got to remember that playing a Massgrav show is similar to running a marathon, whereas a normal band's gig would be a brisk walk to the convenient store.
Anyway, we had an early gig booked at the Knivstapunken festival and one later at night at the Let's Mosh festival in Uppsala. Now, every time we've mentioned we'll be playing in Knivsta, everyone's been warning us how they'd rip us off, what a disaster the arrangement usually is and how terrible it would be, but we figured that if everything was crap, we'd just forget about it and continue to Uppsala. So...

Knivsta
Knivsta is a place where people live because they work in Stockholm or Uppsala but can't afford to live there (or don't want to). It's a shithole of a place. Considering pretty much everyone there visits bigger cities every day, it shouldn't be quite the redneck central that it is. We only stopped to stock up on Coca-Cola and candy (at ICA Kniven!) and drove to the festival ground that was some sort of abandoned dance park or whatever – a busted outdoors stage, a decaying outdoor cafeteria and a huge fucking teepee-like wooden structure with a stage inside. And punks. Tons of the crustiest punks you'd ever seen, that had just woken from last night's stupor and started drinking again.
We were given backstage passes that said "Band meber" (sic) and armbands (which seemed pointless considering there was noone at the gate when we arrived, you could just walk right in) and were made to sign a contract for the first time in our carreer, which basically said we had to pay for everything we trashed and wouldn't get paid if we were too fucked up on drugs. No problem, we got paid in advance, that was our only condition for playing.
We'd asked for an early slot, since we were continuing to Uppsala and had subsequently been told to play at two in the afternoon. Ok, fine, whatever... Only, when we got there at one, the stage was empty – no amps, lights or PA. They woke up a guy called Blöjis (christ on a fucking bike, what's with these people?) and he slowly started putting things together. At two thirty, the sound guy showed up and at three or so, we started playing.
It is probably quite easy to imagine what kind of a gig it was, three in the afternoon in front of a rather small crowd of hung-over crusties, in a hall that would swallow thousands. Anyway, we ripped through the set, played some unusual songs for the hell of it and some of them seemed to like us and we sold a lot more merch than expected, so all in all a fun experience and not half as troublesome as we'd anticipated.
Later we were told by the guys in Assassination that they were scheduled to play at six but ended up going on stage at ten thirty. So, getting to play first was like winning the lottery. We packed up and left just as the cops showed up.

Uppsala
The gig in Uppsala couldn't have been much more different (except we could have had good sound, but at Ungdomens hus in Uppsala, you never do). Let's Mosh is a hardcore fest featuring mainly sXe bands and everyone looked very proper (except for that fucking clown in Heading For Disaster who'd decided a fucking kilt and a balaklava was the coolest outfit for a singer - he looked like Highlander robbing a bank or something).
After a nice Italian meal in a restaurant recommended to us by Diskonto-Steffe (fuck vegetarian venue-food!), we hung out for a while talking to people while Norse scavenged the distros and then we were on.
Ok show with lots of yapping in between songs and a few unusual ones here as well, especially ending the gig with Diskonto's old "Åttioett" with Steffe on vocals. Our cover version of Final Exit's "Umeå Hardcore" went down really well too. Great crowd as usual in Uppsala!
We stuck around for a while and watched Sista Sekunden, which are fucking great, and then some hardcore band that Norse liked and finally The Kind That Kills, featuring Bruce Banner-Per (the younger of them, the drummer) on drums, pretty damn good stuff. Then we left and for once we made it home before four in the morning, which is nice for a change.
Ok, so we've proven we can do it, but I don't think we'll do two gigs in one day in a while – it's too damn painful the next day. Indy tried to change a lightbulb the day after but had to give up because of the pain...
We're old and tired, but the hate won't ever fade. True 'til death. Hardcore for life.
Etc...
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For a number of reasons, I think we'd all been looking forward a bit extra to playing these two dates with Diskonto. It would mark the release of our split album and we were playing in good venues both nights and Diskonto are nice people to hang out with and finally: Mob 47 were opening for us in Stockholm - their first gig in 20 years. And with all the hassle that comes with releasing an album (writing, rehearsing, recording, artwork for CD, LP and poster and more), it'd be good to have a couple of gigs to mark the end of the project. Shit, I sound like those orange county choppers assholes. Sorry!

Anyway, Friday nite in Stockholm and of course pretty much everyone knew Mob were playing, even though we'd tried to keep it a secret (as they wanted us to). What can you say – it was really weird to hear them play their old classics (not enough of them though) and people went apeshit and a good time was had by all. Diskonto seemed a bit reluctant to take the stage after Mob but they did a great job and played their side of the split just as it sounds on the CD (well... more or less), Godske was pissed off with Martin for starting the first song too fast and the whole band seemed unhappy but we thought it was great.
Our own gig was fun too, with Wallin stagediving from the crowd onto the stage a number of times. We played a handful of songs off the split and a couple of brand new ones that we've never done live before; "Vi skiter i Persson" and "Utan trosor i Tyrolen" and we also did the Eddie Meduza "Socialdemokraterna" cover off our upcoming Yacopsae split.
The most memorable thing about this gig was probably the total weirdness of going backstage after the gig and have all members of Mob 47 standing there telling you how great it was. Surreal, to say the least. Thanks to Jenny for helping us sell merch.

Saturday afternoon, we headed north for Uppsala, a bit worried about the gig since all of us felt a bit worn out by the gig the previous night. Fellini (which is sort of a classic venue, I guess) turned out to be a pretty normal bar, where the stage and PA had to be carried from the basement and assembled when there's a gig. Anyway, we did the usual stuff you do before a gig – soundchecks, a quick visit to the Diskonto rehearsal space for more gear, beer drinking and hell raising; business as usual. We were to play first that night, but we still weren't due on stage until midnight. The people of Uppsala seem rich, last time we played there we set a new record for selling shirts and stuff and sure enough, it was broken in Uppsala – lots of money to spend on new recordings, thank you very much.
So, at midnight, we played and it turned out to be one of our most fun gigs ever! The crowd was totally insane and we did ok though the vocals may have been a bit weak at times. That doesn't matter though when you have a crowd that's all too willing to take over the vocal duties at all times. Fun as fuck – we'd love to do it again (and here's the good news Uppsala – we're back in only a month, put a cross on June 3d and come see us again).
Diskonto did a super gig too and showed off all their tattoos and did all their cool punkstar poses (just kidding). TB and Jonken from Uncurbed showed up and were in charge of the merch table for a while (thanks), unfortunately we were unable to convince them to do a vocals and drums-set of Uncurbed hits though.
To sum it up, it was a good weekend. Thanks to those of you who came to see us make asses of ourselves, extra thanks to those of you who were smart enough to buy "A blaze..." (the rest of you can get it from this website, what are you waiting for?), thanks to Per Banner for arranging the Stockholm gig and extra special thanks to Diskonto!

Stockholm, Tantogården, February 24, 2006

Pretty weird circumstances – a release party for a swedish splatter movie with a death metal soundtrack, featuring four punk bands???
Anyway, we hadn't played Stockholm for about a year and we knew all the other bands so it was bound to be a bit of fun. Good turnout and payday Friday made sure everyone was a bit more turbo charged than usual. The good turnout made it impossible to find a table to sell merch from, so Norse cruised the facilities with his plastic bags, selling shirts to unsuspecting fans.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the other bands (Bombstrike, Diskonto and Bruce Banner) did good and Per Banner cut himself when jumping from the PA speaker into a pile of broken glass on the stage floor... We played last and didn't do too great. The perfect on-stage sound from soundcheck earlier that night was gone with the wind and we couldn't hear shit and subsequently screwed up a few songs. Nobody seemed to mind though, great crowd! Lots of getting on stage, shaking fists and throwing bottles.
Loggan ruined "Blåst på konfekten" as always and Fenok taped the whole thing, maybe we'll share a few clips later on.
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Sandviken, Kungen, February 4, 2006

2006 is the year of Massgrav. Not only will we celebrate our 10 year anniversary, but we have a shitload of stuff going on; the release of the mighty Diskonto split, hopefully a couple of other releases as well, more shows than ever planned and new merchandise in abundance. To kick it off, we went to Sandviken, to the legendary Kungen venue, to headline (apparently) their "Punkpartaj 4" two day festival.
Driving there was cold as fuck and pretty eventless except for a stop at the too-weird-to-describe Dragons Gate diner/hotel/chinese palace. The food at the venue was vegan, so the first stop in Sandviken was the pretty crappy restaurant Napoleon, where we stilled our hunger for meat with two plankstek and one grillmix.

Anyway, once we were at the venue, we hung out, talked to tons of people, too many to mention but basically people in other bands, the Kungen crew and some of the people who are setting up the gig in Linköping we're going to. We tried to sell some merch (and naturally the kids bought only shirts and no CDs, go figure), laughed at funny mohawked punks and checked out the other bands.
Norse and Indy were blown away by Principle of Existance, a brand new band with some guys from Entombed and The Dontcares. Indy was blown away twice as he very much enjoyed the massive gig by Sanctuary In Blasphemy as well. The second to last band – Abandon - was some sort of extremely slow stuff from Gothenburg (so there's two errors right there) who not only played forever, they took forever to set up and then remove their stuff from the stage as well (four strikes, you're out!).
Anyway, FINALLY, we got on stage at 00.30 and played a chaotic set of new and old favorites. The monitors were fucked but we did the best we could and people seemed to like it, as they were going apeshit all over the place.
The drive home sucked – it took forever and it was snowing and the road was icy and we didn't get home til like five in the morning. Showbusiness – it's so fucking glamorous. To ice the cake, Norses backpack was left behind (that's what happens when you trust the rest of the band to pack your stuff while you prance around eyeballing punk chicks instead of helping out), but it should be back in town by the time you read this so don't worry. Over and out.
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After playing crazed punk fests in Germany and the Czech republic, going to Jönköping to play in a room smaller than an average livingroom may not seem like the most exciting thing in the world. But still, it's been a while since the last gig and since all our other shows during the fall were cancelled by us or others, we felt pretty good as we left Stockholm.
The massgravmobile is totally fubared so we had to rent a car - once again we travel in style! However, Indy showed an appalling lack of band spirit as he turned up with no comp CDs for the drive…
So, we drove down there, got to the venue which was really really small. They were only allowed to legally admit 30 people INCLUDING the people in the bands - well, that rule was broken big-time for this gig since over 60 people paid for us to play. We met up with Warcollapse-Janne who'd set up the gig and with Sub Alert, a band featuring Hellshit-Ted and Svarta Lucia-Per (who Ola and Johan did a crappy documentary on 10 years ago when he was a militant vegan) which would play before us.
Soundcheck was a bit of a hassle and then we were off to eat kebab. Indy and Johan claim the Jönköping kebab is the best there is. Ola was less impressed.
So, back to the venue for a few beers, watching Sub Alert and waiting for The Kalasgris Crew and Jenny to show up (they drove up from Göteborg to see us and Jenny even had to fix her car to be able to go anywhere, so we thought we'd wait for them to arrive before we started playing).
Hot as fuck, but a fun gig. Not much to say, really. We played fast as hell, insulted the Gbg-people and then it was over.
Went for beers in some crappy place where the Counterblast bass player played horrible soul music (Please note that Ola who’s writing this has absolutely no taste when it comes to music. The music was top notch! /indy) and everyone tried to look like they lived in Stockholm whilst keeping their eyes glued to the big screen tvs showing sports. Peasant assholes!
Still, we met some Counterblast and G-Anx people and the Grindnecks/Kalasgris people came along for a few beers so it was pretty nice. Jocke Counterblast and Steve Hakeskog talked about their job (they are gravediggers!) and growing pumpkins and then we went over to Lilla Paris where the beer was cheap and the people were scary and that was pretty much it, apart from some people trying to get into a fight with us (we declined).
We stayed the night at Indy’s parents’ place in Skärstad. They were great and as an extra treat we got to see some fantastic photos and paintings (!) of Indy as a kid. Look for them on future album covers.
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Jkpg photos by Markus Svensson.

Play Fast or Don't 2 festival.
Svojsice, Czech Republic 19-20/8 2005.

Thursday. Only a complete fucking nutcase would pay Massgrav to fly across Europe to play at his festival. This time, the name of the poor deluded organizer was Otto and the name of the festival was Play Fast or Don't 2 (which gave us an idea we'd fit right in). The big megastars of the festival, apart from us of course, were Hellnation, and we suspect Ken was chiefly responsible for getting Otto to book us. Sayyadina were playing as well, so we flew down together without much happening except the airline thugs managed to fuck up Indy’s cymbal case. Oh, the almighty Clawfinger niggers were on the same flight which aroused some major excitement (or maybe not..).
As Sayyadina departed with some guys from the band Karl Marx in a crusty minivan, we ambled over to the waiting Mercedes and had our driver (who actually stood waiting for us holding a sign which said “Massgrav”!) take us to the Grand Hotel Praha, superbly located by the main square in the old town (impossible to miss while drunkenly stumbling around the maze that is Prague, perfect for us).
A nice quiet day of beer-drinking, porn-watching, meat-eating and tanning (that's just Norse though, Indy is as black as he needs to be and Ola prefers to stay white). We took a quick look at The Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments, but it was pretty much like an exhibition at the library. Cool thing to see the Iron Maiden, though.
It’s pretty obvious that the Czech Republic is a beer country. Their drinks totally fucking suck. We had some Mai Tai and a Zombie, and they tasted like shit. So did the White Russian later on in the evening. The beer was amazing though. And cheap as hell.
(Indy is usually a bit shy of the stronger stuff but the end of the night saw him guzzling weird colored drinks like they were going out of style.)

Friday. After a great breakfast (little did we know it would be the last good food we'd eat in the republic), we had our driver take us to the train station so we could leave for Pardubice where we'd stay for the rest of the festival. Language difficulties stopped us from getting a first class compartment and we had to endure a pack of rowdy poser punks in Exploited-shirts and tie-dye jeans pestering the train. Fuck them punks. They weren't even going to the festival.
Taxi to the hotel, which turned out to be THE place to have your wedding party when getting married in this town. We arrived in the middle of the wedding lunch and drew a few suspicious looks, but we didn't linger to destroy the wedding party, but headed for the festival instead - deep in the woods of Bohemia. It's a fucking miracle anyone showed up in this remote spot.
Meet and greet with Hellnation and Otto, and then we killed some time before our gig by checking out the distro market and watching some bands (Ruidosia Immundicia were easily the best band that night, except for us of course).
The backstage area consisted of two small rooms and we immediately put a sign on the door to the inner room saying "Massgrav", which seemed to give the other bands the idea that A) this was our private dressing room and B) we were asshole rockstars. Fun stuff.
Once we got on stage, things were a bit confused as there were no bass amp for Ola and no speaker cable for Norse and the sound guy managed to fuck up our carefully picked intro music thoroughly. Anyway, finally we were able to start and things went really well, we ripped through our set, played a fistful of new songs and finished with a couple of covers (“Dom ljuger/Rustning är ett brott” as a small Mob 47-medley, and “Arbetsförmedlingen = Skitförmedlingen” by Krigshot). People went nuts and we had a lot of fun. Big thanks to the amazing crowd who were totally into it, stage diving and hammering their fists in pure bliss, especially after Norse started to scream “It’s time to raise the flag of hate!”.
After the gig, we just got drunk and hung out with Sayyadina and Hellnation. Now, about Hellnation, there's a few things to be said. We'd been looking forward to meeting them, especially since we've had a lot of email contact with Ken (who runs Sound Pollution) and Doug (who's releasing a comp we're on) and they all turned out to be the nicest people you've ever met. You never know what people will be like, but rarely have we met a band that we got along with as great as we do with Hellnation (and with Sayyadina as well, for that matter - those two bands together really made this trip a fucking blast).

Saturday. Finally, with our show out of the way, we were able to do some serious drinking. After a stop at McDonalds for breakfast and another at Tesco for beer and chips, we headed to the beautiful old town square and its outdoor bars. The Helladina guys joined us after a while but they were all playing that night so they went easy on the beer. After a while, we walked over to the castle park and as the hot and sunny day drifted into the afternoon, Massgrav drifted into oblivion. We headed back to the hotel, where there was another wedding party and this time we decided to join. I don't know whether the wedding guests appreciated our party crashing but they seemed to be amused by our drunken pogodancing to their eastern eurotechno hits (but not so amused by our food fight). Otto arrived to save them from us. Check out a video clip of the event by clicking here (16 Mb!).
When we got back to the festival in the evening the whole area had been drenched in rain an hour earlier and was now mud paradise. We'd decided during the day that we'd set up a small merch booth together with the other guys, so we did, and we actually managed to sell a few things, but the combination of us being shitfaced, all the others selling really cheap merch and us choosing a very dark and muddy spot didn't make for great sales.
That night Guided Cradle turned out to be nice guys and did a cool Driller Killer-inspired gig. One of the singers of Autoritär came over to tell Indy he didn't like Massgrav as we have such rockstar attitudes, and Indy told him something like "If you want to be down here, that's ok with us, but we're going to stay up here (insert hand gestures) where we belong". Hoho.
The Horror from the UK did a great gig but when Norse tried to show his appreciation by jumping up and down in front of the singer (on stage), he was shoved off the stage immediately, which really pissed him off...
Anyway, finally it was time for Hellnation to do their thing and they sure did that. Shit, they ripped and rocked! And Indy was very proud that they used his cymbals. Norse was up front with his hands in the air all the time, screaming! After that, Sayyadina did a killer gig as well but at that time, the drinking started to take its toll and Ola even fell asleep a couple of times on stage behind Ove’s kit. The rest of the night consisted of more drinking, hanging out with people who liked our bands, trading merch and planning a night out in Pardubice.
Unfortunately, we had to drop stuff off at our hotel and we sort of crashed face down as soon as we got there. Helladina painted the town red and stayed up til 8 in the morning. Sorry we missed that one.

Sunday. Hang-overs galore, we said goodbye to Hellnation and Pardubice and rode with Otto (now nicknamed “Drive fast or don’t” as well as “Big shit for me”) towards the Prague airport. Pretty eventless day, nothing to tell really. Well, actually lowlife hard rock giants Europe were on the same flight and they were shitfaced as well. Rock stars united under the flag of hate. We hope to visit the Czech Republic for more demolition further on. Until then - thank you all and fuck you very much.
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The Yellow Dog 10th Anniversary Festival
Packebush, Germany July 15-16th June 2005

Friday. Going to Packebush. Yellow Dog celebrated their 10th anniversary by hosting a festival there and they wanted us to play and it sounded like fun, so we went.
First part sucked, but then again, flying always suck, especially in the hands of the air nazis at Ryan Air. Then followed a three hour crust van ride with music that defies all description (what is it with German music? And in the midst of all totally crap german punk we got some equally crappy swedish, very obscure trallpunk… what the fuck?!). Rain pouring down on the autobahn and some depressing messages from Dissteffe who was already there, about how the festival was held at a run-down east german farm with no audience, didn’t make us feel any better, but after a stop for döner kebab and beer things felt alright.
When we arrived in Packebush, there were lots of people there so things felt even better. Then, when we discovered that all the other bands were sleeping in bare, dirty rooms with nothing but vomit-stained mattrasses for furniture and no doors, whereas we had a room with sofas, stereo, record collection, satellite tv, refridgerator and all kinds of luxuries (including a door with a lock on it) everything got fantastic! We shared the room with its owner, a german punk called Assi, a quiet, nice guy who didn't spend much time in his room as he was a bartender at the festival and they were pretty busy all the time.
As we were playing second to last the next night, there was nothing to stop us from getting shitfaced (no problem since we got 20 beers each per night). Since half the bands at the festival were from Sweden, you felt right at home, lots of familiar faces. Apart from a minor disagreement between Ola and Norse, where Norse apparently poured a beer over Ola’s head (including the snazzy haircut and the massive beard), nothing important happened. We got drunk, talked to people, wrestled and watched the Uncurbed guys do funny stuff. They were bumped to Saturday since Yellow Sven thought they were too drunk to play Friday. Norse spent a small fortune on merchandise (two Charles Bronson t-shirts!). Same old same old.
Checking back to the room in the middle of the night Norse went fucking bananas, playing “Californa über alles” at the wrong speed (damn, it was fast!), stealing tomatoes and air drumming the fuck out of himself on Assi’s couch. He soon passed out after that show and when Assi got back from the bar he took great care of the shitfaced Norse, bringing him blankets and pillows and stuff. Nice guy!
Best band today and on the whole festival: Looking For An Answer! Amazingly crushing grindcore chaos and destruction with lots of hooks and violence. The Terrorizer-cover went down fine.

Saturday. A quick rinse in the trough and an even quicker glance at the vegan breakfast and we were off to Salzwedel for sightseeing and more döner. A zoo, a Trabant parade and the village idiot kept us busy for a while but we also had time to check out their super modern public toilet that played music and cleaned itself. Very futuristic.
As we got back to the festival Uncurbed did a great gig and Jimmy jumped off the stage, bass and all, sort of in slow motion. We retired to our room for drinks and preparations and got onstage as darkness descended on Packebusch, very fitting. We ripped through our set, Walain sang "Blåst på konfekten" with us, we messed up a few but nailed most of them and people seemed to enjoy themselves and so did we. We even got a mosh pit going in our new song, “Ett korståg mot långsam käng”. Great stage, great sound and a great crowd.
After our gig, we were going to get drunk and maybe watch To What End?, but by now the beer was so undrinkable (completely flat, weird-tasting and served in less than clean glasses), we all stayed pretty sober and it took us forever to dump our stuff in our room since so many nice people wanted to talk to us. We kind of missed the last gig of the evening (though it lasted forever, they must have done about 100 encores). It sounded good, though, and the response from the crowd was once again amazing.
More festival stuff, drinking, shouting, arguing, laughing and trying to explain to the TWE bass player that we have never made jokes about rape on- or offstage, as he (for some reason) seemed to think and was very upset about. Really strange.
The DJ played all the classic hits there are in the world for ten thousand hours and people were dancing like crazy to ABBA and “The Final Countdown” and shit like that.
All and all, it was a great little festival with good bands and nice people. Cool place too, an abandoned brick factory or something, loads of ancient machinery dumped everywhere - you should go there if they decide to do it again.

Sunday. A guy woke us up to tell us we needed our passports to be let out of the building. One of the guys that lived there had apparently blown his brains out in our house while we were sleeping and the cops wanted to ID us in case they needed to ask us questions later. Indeed a tragic ending for a great festival. We wrapped up our stuff, left a few presents for poor Assi (as it turned out, we left more than we intended - Assi, if you're reading this, could you send us the hoodie we left on your couch?) and headed out of there in the Bombstrike-bus feeling a bit awkward.
Going home-days suck, you smell bad and you just wanna get home. We didn’t have time for breakfast, so when stopping for gas the Massgrav militia got some dead meat at McDonald’s which caused some minor excitement amongst the punks. Guess they were starving to death.
Not much exciting happened, except the security assholes at the airport had a field day and x-rayed our shoes and then the airhostess was a complete bitch to Norse and Indy. All in all a fucked day, we'd been better off without it and a one day shorter life.
Anyway, the trip to Germany was a good one, we met lots of cool people and had a nice time and we should have brought more merch as we sold what little we had with us (five cd’s…). Come see us at Play Fast or Don't II in August and we'll try to bring shirts and stuff.
Cheers!
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Uppsala, Junidansen, Ungdomens Hus, June 13th

Despite the rumors that we were on the Muppsala hardcore blacklist, we were asked to play the Junidansen festival (last minute booking, though!). Unfortunately, we were to play Monday night and all the good bands (Uncurbed, Sayyadina and others) played Sunday (weird days, huh?), but since that gave us the chance to totally dominate the Monday, we accepted. Monday is usually a crap gig day, but not in Uppsala apparently - lots of people and more punk patches and spikes than you can shake a stick at. We only had time to catch Insurgent Kid and The Great White Plague (Indy loved them, but he was probably the only one (in the world, not just in the band)). Wallin rode with us in the car and we met disSteffe and some of the Bruce Banner guys so it was pretty nice.
Unfortunately we had some equipment problems (there was no bass amp, just a guitar amp that Ola had to ducktape to the cabinet to stop it from falling off and there was absolutely no monitors) so we couldn't hear what the hell we were doing. So, the first half was a complete mess of unfinished songs, swearing, apologizing (not something we do a lot) and broken fingers. Then things got a bit better and we finished the set in grand style and sold tons of CDs and shirts (thanks for making us even more rich than we already are). Even though we fucked up some songs the audience demanded an encore. Woho! Great crowd, Uppsala rocks!
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Stockholm, Alcazar May 7th 2005

Per, one of the singers of Bruce Banner, asked us to join them and Sayyadina (with Ove back behind the drums) for a show at his and Bruce Banner-Daniel's new punk/hc club; Klubb Statskupp. Great line-up at a good venue with great sound, sure enough the place was packed half an hour after the doors opened. Good for us, not so great for the people left standing in line outside (although hc-danne did get in after two hours in line, just in time for our gig - massive respect for the support!). Since the Bruce Banner drummer worked late, they had to soundcheck late and would play first. Grind-Ove was a fucked-up mess of frayed nerves since it was his first time behind the drums in over three years so they wanted us to play last. Never the ones to turn down a headline slot, we accepted and it turned out to be a wise move. After BB and Sayyadina had done their thing (and done it good - especially when Per jumped an unsuspecting 138 and ground him into the floor) and the audience had gotten shitfaced enough, we entered the stage (without our intro music though, thanks to the alzheimer patient we've got on guitar - more about that later) and started off with "Hatfylld & Nerpissad" and then just pretty much continued. We played four new songs that seemed to go down ok, especially "Kuken Står" that some people have heard a few times by now. Domar, Wallin, Dr. Carlsson, Buss-Fredde and the BB boys were at the front, shaking their ass, breaking glass and stealing our mikes all the time. Beer was raining constantly and Norse was hit in the head with a couple of beer glasses when he introduced the new track "Alla Punkare e Horor" ("All punks are whores"), fortunately they serve beer in plastic glasses at Alcazar...
For our second last song, we were playing a Krigshot cover: "Arbetsförmedlingen = skitförmedlingen", only Norse played a totally different Krigshot song (remember the alzheimer?) and didn't notice until it was time for the chorus. Not our proudest moment... Anyway, we'd gotten our new shirts from BB-Daniel and we sold a shitload of them and that was pretty much it, I'd say. Cool show, probably our best so far.
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Oslo, Blitz April 16 2005

As a first step towards world domination, we decided to accept when Bruce Banner wanted us to join them for a trip to Oslo to play with Skitsystem and Speedergarben (a band consisting of swedes living in Oslo).
Somebody tricked Wallin into driving us and he turned out to be the worlds slowest driver and a great lover of all music that's slow and devestatingly bad. Still a nice guy though. So, getting there was a drag and took forever... But Blitz was pretty cool, except their backstage area was up three flights of stairs and our arms hurt for two days after the gig from carrying shit up there.
Speedergarben were surprisingly good and got a nice moshpit going. They were great guys as well, so all hails to them.
The funny-talking norwegians wanted one of the bands to play last, after all the night busses had left (Skitsystem being the main act, they got to play just before the busses left). We flipped for it and got to play early while Bruce Banner got the sucker slot. We had a cool gig with lots of crazy-ass church-burning lusekoftepunx. We may have missed a note here and there due to the liberal amount of beer we'd gotten but all'n'all it was good. Some dudes thought we had Mark Wahlberg on guitar, but Norse preferred to be nicknamed Dirk Diggler for the rest of the night. Ola was later on nicknamed "Karl Marx with downs syndrome" by the way...
Skitsystem had to borrow our bass after having spent almost an hour on stage trying to fix theirs. Not only did they tune it down to C, they also got it all sticky and yucky - never again! They had a great raw sound and Kalle, the drummer, was so damned exhausted he almost fainted between each and every song. Pretty cool gig, but kind of sloppy and untight due to bad sound on stage, probably. Same thing goes for us, but hey, we're not gay Dream Theater, you dumb fucks.
Bruce Banner rocked the house and quite a few stayed behind to see them. It's always fun to watch the two vocalist trying to outsmart each other with various hardcore moves. Per won this time since he fell off the stage at least twice.
Then we were off to a party at a huge squat with a basement bar that sold all kinds of interesting stuff, before we walked about 2000 miles to the apartment of Blitz-Daniel, where Norse instantly crashed face down in the hallway, Indy rushed in to grab the only couch and Ola got to sleep in the collective collection of empty beercans and bottles. The trip home sucked as everyone was hungry, hung-over and sick of listening to Amebix.
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Stockholm, Kafé 44 March 15 2005

We played with some poser Hellacopters wannabees, some metal-HC band from the south (that had brought their 3 existing fans, lucky for them) and the german band Hellström (everyone should know by now that singing drummers are a bore, but Norse liked them and bought tons of merch).
Per turned up and got it all on video, and it sure is fun/embarrassing to watch. Norse screams like a fucked pig, Ola raises the dead and Indy looks like the guy on our EP (completely fucked). Even our mothers wouldnt' recognise us.
Sayyadina-Andreas kept demanding we'd take off our shirts (why?) and Loggan tried to get us some shitty Bombstrike/Subvision-sound by turning the knobs on Norse's pedals throughout the whole gig. He also managed to scream "blååååst" totally off-beat in "Blåst på konfekten", and that seems to be his trademark nowadays...
Not much else happened. Good show, but pretty quiet, as can be expected on a weeknight at a place that doesn't sell beer. The crowd seemed pleased, so I guess we didn't insult them that much this time. We have to change that.
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Norrköping, Club Amper/Bifrost MC March 11 2005

Shittiest weather you've ever seen, and we had to drive down to Norrköping. After managing to survive the rain, snow and ice, we found the motorcycle club/garage we were supposed to play, got money to get pizza (all you other people who set up gigs, this is the greatest idea - we don't want your fucking vegan casserole, we want to get whatever pizza we want. And we hate mushrooms, ok? (NO! Gimmie mushrooms or gimmie death. /indy)). The pizza turned up to suck ass, one of the worst pizzas ever! Fuck.
Anyway, we were playing with Uncurbed, who turned out to be quite a bunch of characters. Since the weather sucked and the venue was pretty remote, the turn-out was very poor. We played first and some local fucking clown thought it would be a great idea to show people how cool he was (the guy looked like a total poser idiot, not a punk bone in his body) by crashing the stage, breaking a microphone and pushing everything over. Anyway, the biker security guys finally cooled him down a bit and we ripped, as always.
Uncurbed... Well, Uncurbed would probably have benefited from playing a bit earlier, to put it nicely. Their gig ended in chaos when Steffe left the stage after they'd played all the songs on the setlist, while the others kept playing (with long breaks in between songs to discuss what to play next and to tune the guitars). Dissteffe rode with us in the car home and about half-way, he realized he had the keys to the Uncurbed bus in his pocket. We refused to turn back and continued towards Stockholm (don't know how he got the key to Norrköping the next day, we'll have to ask when we meet them in Packebush). So, to summarize, if the weather had been nicer, it would have been great. Pizza and more beer than you can shake a stick at and money that actually covered the gas costs - cool.