Union Carbide Productions - "Only The Best" (2003)

(This is repost from three years ago. It's awesome.)

Union Carbide Production was a hellraising group of young men from Gothenburg, Sweden who quickly became known as the roudiest bunch in town, both for the chaotic live shows, but also for their arrogant attitude.

Early U.C.P. may have sounded a lot like The Stooges, but these were no thugs, junkies and petty criminals from Ann Arbor. These were snotty upper class kids with money to burn, straight outta da fancy suburban neighbourhoods. They would talk in interviews about how much they loved playing tennis, wearing designer clothers, driving expensive cars their parents bought for them, and working on their tan by the pool. And how they only played rock 'n' roll because their decadent, privileged lives were boring.

Throughout the gigs, frontman Ebbot Lundberg would insult the audience, especially during shows in America where he would spend more time talking about how fat and disgusting everyone was than actually singing. Wherever they went they got on everybody's nerve, just as intended.

It's interesting how punk rock was supposed to be provocative and against the grain, but once you provoke the punks and the rockers themselves and go against their grain, they hate you for it. When they really should appreciate it for truly living up to the punk ethos. When punk and its aesthetics become generic and evolve into little more than rules you must follow in order to be punk, that's the moment the polar opposite becomes punk.

That's when you need spoiled rich kids telling crusty drunks with a mohawk living in a dumpster just how filthy and useless they are. Those who don't get that, don't know what punk was supposed to be in the first place. Those are people destined for a life in their very own kind of conformity, believing themselves to be rebels.

U.C.P. knew this however, and stopped playing raunchy Stooges rock the moment they realised that's what people expected them to do. Instead they mellowed out and adopted darker and more psychedelic influences on the 2nd album, and by the third one they were downright bluesy and Rolling Stones-y.

After recording their fourth album in Chicago with Steve Albini (during which time they got a fan letter from Kurt Cobain), U.C.P. called it quits in 1993. Several members, including Ebbot Lundberg, would go on to form The Soundtrack Of Our Lives.

In 2003 I whipped up this little compilation of my favorite U.C.P. songs.

(zip) Union Carbide Productions - Only the Best (72 mb)

1. Ring my bell
2. Summer holiday camp
3. Cartoon animal
4. So long
5. Born in the 60's
6. Down on the farm
7. Maximum dogbreath
8. Career opportunities
9. Be myself again
10. Golden age
11. Baritone street
12. Can't slow down
13. Coda
14. Mr. Untitled
15. Right phase
16. Chameleon ride
17. Turn off the blues

Tracks 1-4 from In The Air Tonight (1987)
Tracks 5-8 from Financially Dissatisfied, Philosophically Trying (1989)
Tracks 9-13 from From Influence To Ignorance (1991)
Tracks 14-17 from Swing (1992)

Buy all things UCP @ Amazon.com.