Vaaska – Ruido Hasta La Muerte (540 Records)
Deskonocidos – En La Oscuridad (Todo Destruido/Trabuc Records)
I’ve been a nerdy music aficionado for the better part of twenty years now, but have only started to commit my thoughts to the page recently. And I swore up and down when I started writing these reviews that I wasn’t going to fall into the whole “Band A = Band B + Band C if they took a time machine to [insert year]” trap. Save that shit for Alternative Press. But sometimes it can really be difficult, even for a killer album, to muster more than a few comparisons and to offer what, in comparison to the quality of the music, will come off as shallow descriptors.
Vaaska – Ruido Hasta La Muerte (540 Records)
Deskonocidos – En La Oscuridad (Todo Destruido/Trabuc Records)
I’ve been a nerdy music aficionado for the better part of twenty years now, but have only started to commit my thoughts to the page recently. And I swore up and down when I started writing these reviews that I wasn’t going to fall into the whole “Band A = Band B + Band C if they took a time machine to [insert year]” trap. Save that shit for Alternative Press. But sometimes it can really be difficult, even for a killer album, to muster more than a few comparisons and to offer what, in comparison to the quality of the music, will come off as shallow descriptors.
The newest albums by Vaaska and Deskonocidos got me thinking about this approach. Both are exceptional albums that I have enjoyed and wanted to dive into headlong. But there’s just not that much to say about them. The former sounds like Disclose meets Skitkids. The latter (not to be confused with Conor Oberst’s recent shitmound of a side project) sounds like The Wipers and Christian Death. See? Not hard. I could even offer further explication. Both bands, despite their disparities, are from Austin, share members, have records on some of the same labels, and sing in Spanish. You get the idea. I could be writing their press releases, if they were the sort of band to buy into that.
But what falls between the cracks when band comparisons and sub-sub-sub-genre tags are mashed together is vastly more important. This review could be two lines or two thousand lines long but the energy and vitality of the music, dancing so nimbly scant steps ahead of accurate depiction, simply can’t be conveyed. Music is pretty rarely dangerous or innovative these days–and if you meet somebody who says otherwise they probably don’t know their history–but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a band is any less worthy because they are so easily summed up. I could describe the way that certain moments on each record elicited a grin and a “fuck yeah,” but words are often little more than dim shadows, meager simulacra of life’s more resonant experiences. I can simply offer the recommendation that anybody compelled by my reductionist rendering of each band’s work should check them out immediately, if not sooner.
