Review: Expanded Editions of The Mascots' 'Your Mascots' and 'Ellpee'

Garage rock aficionados know The Mascots because of “Words Enough to Tell You”, a romantic jangler that earned a spot on Rhino’s Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond box set. Aside from that one track, they’re pretty obscure outside of Sweden, apparently because they weren’t too concerned about international success. At home, they were considered a Scandinavian Beatles, though The Zombies seemed to have had an equally heavy influence on the band. Their debut album, Your Mascots, blended the Fabs’ buoyancy with The Zombies’ sullenness for a sound a lot like the early Beau Brummels. They were actually darker than any of those groups. Even Lennon hadn’t written anything as nasty as “I hope that this is forever goodbye / I hope that you forever will die” (“Goodbye”) at this point in his career (though he would pretty soon with “Run for Your Life”) and Harrison never sounded as dour as The Mascots do on the pitch-black “For Him”. On a version of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” sung with the blinding speed of the guy from the Micro Machines commercials, The Mascots just sound crazy. All of this makes for one of the most interesting pseudo-Mersey Beat records of 1965.