You have to know that Primer Regimen is probably my favourite
Colombian band, so you can imagine how excited I was when I heard that a
new record was on the way. Excited but surprised... after
Ultimo Testamento in 2018 I thought that the band had split up, I
mean, after all, anyone with a near-zero knowledge of Spanish as myself
would have deducted from the record title that the Bogota band was done
with making the world pogo... Well it looks like we were all
wrong...
But let's take a step back and talk a bit about what happened before
their come-back...
Primer Regimen is from Bogota, Colombia, and features members of
bands like
Secta Suicida,
Final,
Tumbas
and, most of all,
Dead Hero. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken, Dead Hero is (or was?) actually
Primer Regimen with another singer (Dino having chosen
rather to sing in Final). But I'm not going to spend much time on
Dead Hero here, let's say that I'm not a fan at all of the kind of
oi! they're playing.
In 2017 Primer Regimen released a 7" (on
Byllepest Distro
and prior to that on
Ruidos Subterraneo
as a tape) called
No Futuro / No Solución,
a great mix of UK82 / early oi! and Colombian punk made to make your
first grade teacher pogo until the end of times.
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picture by
Rob Coons |
But the real deal came up one year later in 2018 with the famous
Ultimo Testamento, that I mentioned before, once again released
on Byllepest Distro from Norway (managed by Daniel from
Negativ,
Krigshoder
and many other ripping hardcore punk bands).
No Futuro / No Solución
was good but a bit classic I could say,
Ultimo Testamento is still "classic" but is most of
all absolutely fantastic... every song is a pure anthem of
Spanish street punk, this is what pogo punk is and should be, non-stop tupa-tupa drum beat, lyrics I don't understand at all but
wanna scream from the top of my lungs and the energy of a hot
summer uprising... what else can you ask for?
So you understand that to me Primer Regimen had reached
the very top of my personal punk Pantheon and would forever
remain in my heart like THE legendary Colombian band which ripped
the shit out the world of punk from start to finish...
Just like they did at their incredible live show at Manic Relapse
Fest in 2018 in Oakland:
But anyway if you don't know all that already you just lived for
nothing until now... so let's jump to their new 7".
So this new EP (released mid april 2022) named
1983 (but the cover also states
No Futuro / No Solucion like on their first 7") benefits of
a great artwork by Carlos Velasquez who, on top of playing
in
Uzi
and
Muro, has done great artworks for several Bogota bands (Secta,
Uzi etc...). In the end when I write something about
current Colombian punk bands I always come back at some point to
the super-active punk "crew" from the Rat Trap in Bogota
that I talked about a bit in my post about
Unidad Ideologica.
Only available on their bandcamp page at the moment (12 usd for
the EP digital version?! seriously guys?), the 7" should be
released soon by
Discos Enfermos
from Barcelona that I've mentioned a few times on this page (it
looks like Byllepest Distro's been inactive for a while now
for some reasons).
To be honest these songs surprised me at first, it's not really
what I was expecting, maybe I listened too much to
Primer Regimen's first releases and I had in mind that it
was going to be exactly the same. Well it's not. Don't get me
wrong it's not totally different either, Lideres and
Culpables (great drum intro by the way) for example are two
very good tracks which would have perfectly fit in
Ultimo Testamento without any doubt. But the innovation
lies mainly in Hegemonia and Plegaria, two tunes
that grow a dark and heavy atmosphere built around some kind of
"tribal drum beats" that take us far from the usual hardcore
patterns... yes since 2018 the
Singapore hardcore punk scene
has beautifully developed that "haunting and shamanic" hardcore
style (Sial with their latest EP of course, featured in my
Best of 2021 list, but
Xyresic
as well with their strong Spanish influences) and it didn't get
unnoticed in Bogota, leading Primer Regimen to give birth
in the end to an EP which is even better, and more interesting,
than what a good, but classic, follow up to
Ultimo Testamento would have been...
This is a very good and enjoyable EP... hopefully it will be
followed by a European tour at some point!
N,J'Oi!
