Category: Spain

TRACK | Beta Maximo – Voy a salir a vengarme

5/5 golden merles

Úbeda, Spain-based egg punk, crammed to the gills with gatling gun digi drum and deliberate melodic delineations. If you find amusement or solace in one glancing, angular component of this, good news: the entirety is composed of similar muck. The visions clear and hitting what it’s aiming at. Only as crooked as it takes to fulfill the composition, there’s a lot of joy in this pop rock forming and sprouting outside of industrial confinement.

We’ve written on Beta maximo before, but the album has been disappeared. However the new stuff is just as good. As stated at the time, the band was described as “DIYARI (Do It Yourself And Release Immediately), this aesthetic remains intact and uncompromised.” In fact, there has been a new single in the subsequent weeks after this LP, released March 9th, “Hornos de ladrillo.” I am a million miles behind.

Since the 17th of February you could name your price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Decomisos La Toledana – Deprisa, Deprisa

5/5 golden merles

Madrid lo-fi burning with the light, gently obscured but unquestionably recognizable. The track is transcending time through the amalgamated fuel of rock influence and intentional media consumption. And in converting this into a new unit, its value is immediately apparent. The entire demo set has that character, driving at something greater than the genre but utilizing it as a medium for the purposes of conveying. That is hopefully what you want from all art: taking what is at hand and what has resonated, and then tuning it to your own frequency. It does this.

The engine is guitar tone, a viscus echo bleeding off the lead vocal melody, and some tight and direct drumming. It’s familiarity and form that can feel frontloaded with nostalgia, as though it is a unit of articulation convenient to assign a period of your own life, characteristics that are endearing and worthy of application. You could have had it then, but you didn’t, now you do. That is the joy of the thing; another lovely arc of the echo as it emits, another good ring charted around the base, some momentum to keep moving at all or in sync to, a record of our dendrochronology.

Found through Groschi’s tireless searching, part of a four piece mix that will work perfectly as an antidote to all the Christmas playlists you will likely subjected to.

TRACK | FLASH – Nazkauta Nitxiok

5/5 golden merles

From the Spanish Gipuzkoan coast, FLASH fabricate rabid and relentless noise/punk rock. Careening into a controlled burn of synths and axes, it will get your blood moving forward. It has an enduring wrath and commits to the conundrum, frantically yowling in Basque a mantra of renunciation.

The style is warped and gently deteriorated but maintains its melody, so it rests at the only available precipice to us. Which is to say it is found on the periphery of both major pits (pure indulgence/abstraction or commercial solicitation).

Regardless, the balance is truck. The zeitgeist is favorable to it. The sound squirms from the hand of capital, repelling like a magnet from its grasp, while still affording a refined articulation and immediately resonating. The ground will shift and it will fall toward one side or the other, and down we will go with it.

But for now it’s fun and good. I am looking forward to hearing the remainder of the tracks. The vinyl for the album is black & blue and releases September 2nd from La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.

TRACK | Peluquería Canina – Hilda Zaude

5/5 golden merles

“Hilda Zaude” is solid psych-punk rock from Madrid, Spain. It’s contains overlapping guitar phrasing echoing and bounding in a kind of pop-sludge anthem.

The lyrics translated from the Basque speak of death and mourning. It surrounds you / chills your whole body / you are dead / I don’t understand anything.

This is complimented by the menacing, at times reverb-shrieking lead guitar tones, ominous bass, and purposefully dreary scale. The chorus is direct, composed of a solitary scream of “¡ahhh!”

It’s a foreboding track that also has an element of the festive or ceremonial to it, a good mix of garage and ghastly.

TRACK | Prison Affair – Nice Guys

5/5 golden merles

Spanish lo-fi texture god-ghouls, Prison Affair return with Demo III, a slick and bountiful repeater. Top tier sludge and melody worship, it is both sickly and perpetually fun.

The aesthetic sense is something akin to reliably nailing Jell-O/jelly/ectoplasm to the wall; take your pick. Hard to quantify and deceptively simple, spatially ingenious, modestly amuck stuff.

The excited and concurrent release among the lo dash fi pipeline was impressive, dropping last month across Tremendo Garaje, Harakiri Diat, and tagoschlucam, among others, to much outpouring of love. They are highly consistent and rightfully flourishing, short and detailed tracks hyper focused on quality over quantity yet regularly uploading great sets of EPs/demos.

TRACK | Son Bou – Hundí Mis Labios En Los Suyos

5/5 golden merles

Son Bou’s 2013 self-titled EP is blazing indie punk from Barcelona, built of or on a small fire. In either case, they’re tuning to the flame. It holds the finest lo-fi hymnals and tempo shifts, the melodies keenly cut reliably across the set.

The lyrics for the selected track translated bluntly into English are about love, its cultural expectations and preferred collaborators. The arrangement is divinely shifting, hammering together a few fine forms that turn seamlessly along the axis. The velocity changes keep fresh and the variance between verses and are appended by a bridge of textural vocalizations. It is an excellent repeater.

The EP can be ordered from Barcelona for €6 or more + shipping from Hao!Discos. Alternatively Discogs has the 7″ for some very reasonable fees on a few that have made it to the US. Otherwise an absurdly reasonable Euro for the digital issue.

TRACK | Beta Maximo. – Busco corazones.

5/5 golden merles

Spanish lo-fi eggpunk from Úbeda. Grab the intangible digi-drum and sync your muscles to its writhing. Described on their instagram as DIYARI (Do It Yourself And Release Immediately), this aesthetic remains intact and uncompromised.

Spain vice. is a great set. Composed of no track longer than 1:45, it moves relentlessly, flashing past. Nothing overstays, everything burns out immediately in the friction of a few overlapping melodies of synth and guitar crammed into the centrifuge.

You can pay for it, to show your respects, on a donation-basis, howsoever many euros seems appropriate. It’s yet another admirable EP found through the exceedingly reliable hunting of onetwoxu.de.

TRACK | CHROMA – Por Llegar

5/5 golden merles

Por Llegar is indicative of the sort of rage we collectively feel — or those individuals who are capable of feeling part of a collective — in the face of the overwhelming forces presently arrayed against decency.

As Toussaint wrote, “…that you should let yourself be deceived by our ancient tyrants who are only using one-half of our unhappy brothers in order to load the other with chains.”

“Nadie te va a salvar / No one is going to save you”

We are, unfortunately, the ones we have been waiting for. What else can you think watching teachers scramble on the floor as a sideshow in order to sustain themselves and provide basic materials for their students?

TRACK | Daga Voladora – La Tormenta

5/5 golden merles

La Tormenta is the final track on Daga Voladora’s wonderful album Chiu-Chium (“an onomatopoeic representation of the sound made by a flying dagger,” referenced in track 5).

The album cover approximates well the texture, color palette and detailing within: varied warm and fractured synthesizers revolve around the vocal heart of each track.

The track selected, La Tormenta, is an account or rumination on being at sea in the midst of a storms throes. A cover of Lorena Álvarez, the poise of this rendition is held in perpetual balance by the 4-5 electronic murmurs.

There is among them what appears to be a synth estimation of a harpsichord involved, that calmed but febrile plucking. The style is of the highest order, pacing, structure, production and melody.

The calming and all consuming dread is felt, whether in defiance or resignation. And the beauty of this lamentation contorts to good whatever cruelty of fate initiated the storms summoning. There is an account. They have come out the other side.