Swedish band Skitarg (trans. Pissed Off) was the last band of the evening at Tivolirock 2012, and hopefully they’d close the one-day festival down in style. Their own style, that is...

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Skitarg, but as I mentioned they hail from Sweden, and they play, well, some kind of kind of metal of course. I really do have a hard time finding a fitting description for it, but it is both aggressive and somewhat melodic, quite contemporary.
But you know what, it isn’t the music that is the core of this band, it is the humouristically intended lyrics and the general potty wittiness mostly revolving about things related to sex that drives Skitarg. And thus we arrive at the show...

“It’s a hoedown in Kristianstad!”
- Barnet (vocals)

Skitarg was, as I mentioned, the last band of the festival and they were playing the midsized stage of Tivolirock, as they were slotted straight after the headliner D-A-D who had been playing the main stage.
Or actually, for some reason Skitarg began their set slightly before D-A-D were finished, and so we ended up missing the very beginning of the show as we were stuck in the flood of people leaving the area.
Even so, Skitarg had amassed quite a nice amount of people before them.
When I arrived they were already getting busy on stage with their show, of which the two giant inflatable penises standing on either side of the stage was one of the first things I noticed.
Spetälsk Ängel was the first song I got the title of, and here the band was all warmed up and rocking; it was especially the two vocalists Barnet (that’s the guy in the dirty underwear and the beard) and Necrophilip (the larger guy with ponytails and a tutu) who took full advantage of the stage as they were constantly moving about, but the musicians of the group weren’t exactly shoegazers either if you catch my drift.
There was of course a lot of acting out towards the crowd, but the band-members jumped on each other as well from time to time, simulating sodomy and other forms of debauchery for us – within the limiting genre of depravity that Skitarg moves, they were really giving it their all to push the limits! For one thing, Barnet put on a horse-mask before the song Jag Bryter Nacken Av Din Häst which he was parading around with, and at another time they mounted the two penises and used them as bouncing balls around the stage.

It was impressive how many got carried away by this show actually, considering the fact that Tivolirock is a family-friendly event with vastly different styles of music on display. Fair enough, a few lines back people were sitting on the grass or on brought along blankets and gently nodding their heads, but up in front were apparently some genuine fans of the band, and there was a lot of headbanging and singing along to the all Swedish lyrics.
Not all of what the band presented was their own material though, which was apparent nearing the end of the show where it was announced that in July you celebrate Jul (Swedish name for Christmas), and the band went on to play Christmas carols – something the crowd didn’t mind at all apparently! For this, the band also got a guest vocalist on stage, a man I didn’t catch the name of, but who stood out by instead of wearing the evil clown make-up the rest of the band utilizes, he wore a simple Guy Fawkes mask.
He wasn’t the only guest the band had either, earlier on a girl in a school uniform and her own clown make-up had made a short appearance to announce that she was selling merch in the security pit after the show, after which she took a short tour of the security pit and greeted the front-liners before she left. I never saw her return with any merch...

Now, one can ask, is this really anything worth-while, or is it only a blown out of proportions juvenile prank?
Had it been on album (of which the band has released two so far), I would certainly not have spared any energy on the band, that’s how little the music meant to me, but it’s not albums we are reviewing here, now is it?
You see, when it comes to a live-show, they may very well still be awkward behaviour turned flesh, but they are also a group of people with a hell of a lot of energy, and if anything, they are giving it all it can take.
Whether or not I am going to take it more times than this is still undecided, but at least I can say that I am an experience richer.