Swedish metal (or not....?)

I'm currently, besides recording a zillion albums and writing for the mags, working on my third encyclopedia of Swedish Hard Rock 6 Heavy Metal. I've come across a shitload of Swedish bands from the 70-90s I seem to have missed out since Vol 2. I've been quite "generous" in my decisions of what should be included and what should not. Some have critizised me for being "too kind", meaning this and that band is not heavy enough to be featured. Well, I've basically been using collectors as a base for what to include. However now it seems the borders have been even more stretched. Especially by people selling records. "Super rare Swedish metal, not even in the book" it said about one record I had actually excluded because it was not hard rock. Yes, it had the occasional distorted guitar, but the music was pop/disco. I recently came across web auctions with another bunch of stuff I had missed out on, all of them labeled as "Swedish metal/hard rock". I contacted the guy who was nice enough to let me come to his home and check out the stuff. I ended up buying five singles, of which one clearly made it into the book, while the others were borderline cases which I finally decided to include. The rest of the stuff however did not pass the needle's eye. Still - he labeled them "hard rock/metal" and the prices I can assure you were quite outrageous. Some of them were simply rock or power pop, not even AOR. If I had bought these records unheard this guy would have received quite an irritated mail from me, I can assure you.

"Rare" is not the same as "great" and I'm a bit tired of people stirring up interest and prices for stuff that obviously sucks, just because the band only sold 5 copies and threw away the rest of them because noone was interested. There ARE gems out there, but this type of bahaviour makes it harder to find (or chance) on those gems.

Well, I've found some really good stuff that were hiding under the bushes :-)

Current Swedish finds:

VON PANZER - s/t - Great heavies! http://www.vonpanzer.com/

COLDSPELL - "Infinite Stargazer" - Great heavy melodic

ADAMS EVE - s/t - Great Extreme type funkish harc rock

JOKE - two albums out!