Swedish vocals, English vocals, instrumental
International relevance: *
A serious contender for strangest album title: ”What do algae actually do in the winter?”. The music within won't answer the question, it actually raises more questions, like ”Why does this album even exist?”. I assume it's an attempt to present the early 70s Gotland scene – Gotland being Sweden's biggest island well known for its unusual rock formations called rauks (and also the home of the godlike Cement).
The Scam label have an obvious place in progg history, having released 45s by acts such as Great Ad, Raunchy and 4 Ever, not to mention Solid Ground's sole album ”Made In Rock”. Although I'm not a fan of ”Made In Rock”, such a release schedule nevertheless raises the expectations a few notches. But almost the entire LP consists of various acoustic acts, several of them aspiring to comedy which isn't funny. A couple of them became rather famous years later, most notably Smaklösa and Di Sma Under Jårdi with the latter scoring a major hit with the appalling ”Snabbköpskassörskan” in 1985. Anders Peedu in turn had been in 60s freak rock band Friends who released a number of garage rock fuelled 45s of now legendary status. However, his contribution ”Rallarvisa” shows no traces of his noisy, ramshackle past – it's a traditional navvy song.
Everything on this album is bad with one striking exception. After sitting through terrible stabs at moronic humour, bad versions of trad songs, limp trad jazz and what might be the worst Bob Dylan cover ever recorded, the whole things goes out with a bang. ”Gamarnas sång” by Tranz is a riff heavy hard rock track mangling away for 7 minutes. If the vocals leave a bit to be desired, then the guitars fully make up for it. Thankfully, the track was salvaged from obscurity when it was included on the second volume of the marvellous ”Swedish Meathballs” comp in 2022, rendering ”Vad gör egentligen algerna på vintern” completely redundant.
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