Damn I love that cover artwork! Made by
Jose Darcy Cabrera
(a visual artist from Bogòta who's also incidentally the singer of
Muro), it perfectly combines the bleak and violent imagery of the good old
cut and paste punk art tradition with some modern art influences, the
central circles recalling what
Pol Bury
was doing
in the 70s on photographs. One of the best cover artwork of the year for sure.
So yes Unidad Ideológica comes from Bogòta, Colombia and more precisely
from the same punk gang as many bands I've already mentioned on this page,
the hyperactive
Rat Trap
punk gang (if I may say).
Casa Rat Trap
is a concert and rehearsal place but also a
silk-screen printing
and
visual art workshop
and a recording studio (yes it sounds like your dreamed punk HQ).
The band features members from some of the best and most furious
Colombian punk acts you've already heard screaming way too loud in your
headphones, bands like
Muro,
Alambrada,
Trampa
and
Ataque Zero
(probably others too). If you've been a bit around my page you may have
noticed that Colombian bands have been featured quite a lot over the past
two years (just check the
Colombia tag) and I think anyone interested in hardcore punk will agree that it's one
of the most active and interesting scene at the moment, and it's not
Unidad Ideológica that proves me
wrong...
After one track released on the
La Masacre Continua compilation
(Guerra Y Negocio, also on the 12"), the band jumps straight to the
"mini LP 12"" on
La Vida Es Un Mus
(a very frustrating format the London-based label, but not only, uses
quite a lot which means not so much music on a 12" at the price of a
proper full-length) with eight tracks of blistering hardcore punk.
Hardcore punk? well yes and no, if you're thinking of fast US-type 80s
hardcore that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking Colombian
"raw punk" so you gotta look more on the side of the 80s
Scandinavian/Finnish hardcore bands and all their south American
counterparts. Nowadays there's Muro and the others already
mentioned for Colombia of course but I can also think of the Italian raw
punk scene (especially the Milan scene and bands like
Kobra
and
Sloi
evolving around DIY labels like
Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni) or some of these new British bands whose records got recently out
on La Vida (Koma,
Maladia,
Rat Cage...) or even what
S.H.I.T was doing... No I won't mention any Japanese hardcore bands because
I'm not a fan of most of them (nah!). Anyway this kind of sound can be
found a bit everywhere these days, the main point being to make it
fast, noisy and violently savage and yes most of the times these bands
stand at the very edge of what I can enjoy.
So yes Unidad Ideológica songs are full of rage and anger (definitely)
but benefit from a great sound quality that allows the devastating energy
of the tracks to fully blossom in something that sounds both very noisy
and very clean but above all very aggressive (it's a bit what's missing in
the Italian hardcore scene by the way, not the aggressiveness obviously
but the sound quality). What often puts me off in this kind of bands are
the vocals (cavemen vocals suck) and the metal influences,
Unidad Ideológica sounds quite heavy sometimes but never "metal"
(thank you guys, metal sucks) and the singer does a great job, managing to
vary his voice tone from a tortured and enraged scream to something more
spoken without ever falling into the forced caricature of "I want to sound
super mean" (good job).
Ok the record is quite short (it could be short and perfectly repetitive)
but the band manages to deliver relatively varied tracks (while remaining
in the theme eh), there are intros, breaks, changes of tempo which allow
the listener to remain hooked and interested throughout (all the contrary
of a boring D-beat band finally) and the more I listen to this record the
more I discover about the smart songs' construction and the more I
appreciate it.
These eight songs were recorded during the very strict (and very long)
Covid lockdown that happened earlier this year in Colombia and you can
really feel all the frustration and anger of this period (on top of all
the terrible things that have been happening in the country... check my
short
post on the situation here) in this record. And that's exactly what Punk is for, letting anger,
frustration and political rage burst into noise and even if I don't
understand anything about their songs' lyrics I'm pretty sure
Unidad Ideológica is full of all that...
Ok let's stop it here, you got the idea: if you're not afraid of taking a
wall of fast aggressiveness right in your little sensitive nose there is
no time to waste, bang your head against
Unidad Ideológica right now!
N,J'Oi!
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire