Maquina Muerta - Realidad Desesperada CS

From Guadalajara, Mexico by way of Mallorca, and sitting with bands like Cremalleras, Tercer Mundo, Dia Final and Peña Nieto as proof or Mexico's killer current punk scene, Maquina Muerta delve into rawpunk at its most primitive. Their seven inch last year was one of my favourite records of the year, and they maintain that fury here, rerecording a couple of the tracks and adding them to some new ones, here the sound is more a drilling buzz and less steamroller roar, but it's still got that relentless repetition, that uncompromising Discharge thrum, the drums eating at you like the turnover of a floodedengine and you're stuck on traintracks, the saltedearth choke in its scorchedthroat vocals, burning, breaking, with each anguish, nameable and unnameable, the guitar solos simplistic quiverings amongst the groan and drone.

I caught Maquina Muerta play in an torridly hot basement at the start of September. Barreling out of the venue into the street to cool down after the set a friend of mine asked me what I thought of it. "It was fucking great!" I breathlessly enthused "Every song was exactly the same!". 30 seconds later another friend of mine came out and was greeted with the same question "Eh... I wasn't too into it," she replied. "Every song was exactly the same." There's a particular groove, a certain dirty rut, that they're locked into and they're not breaking it, they're living with each scrap of terror and emotion and thunderous anger, at society, at authority, at politicians and the assorted scum that prop up these shiny venal gods, each last pusflecked bonemeal scrap that they can squeeze out of that ugly monotonous sonic wound.

Maquina Muerta - s/t EP

Scalding flat rawpunx from Mexico. Clattering, primitive and physical. Gimme that ineptitude. The drums slap and crash chaotically, the vocals burn mightily with the weight of passion and affliction, a worked and turned over field in the throat, blood in spit and sound. You can hear the creases and strain as it screams "MAQUINA DE MUERTE" like an invocation on the title track, "NO! NO! NO! NO!" on Sangre Inocente, leading into Todo El Odio with an unaccompanied blisterburst bellow of "RABIA! RABIA! RABIA!". These repetitions like the simplistic direct bludgeonpunk repetitions of the music, each riff simple and uncatchy, but relentless, driven into with conviction, reiterated without quarter given, message and bluntness undimmed, unaltered each time, a monotony of brutality. This noise comes round again, this noise doesn't leave, this noise doesn't know how. It all turns over in a such a way as to almost abnegate momentum with brickwall ugliness, sticking its guitars in such inelastic scritching grooves, rarely using them for anything but the abrading. There's a slippery wild movement at the end of Sangre Inocente, with noise wobbles flickering over rerun bass riffs, a small solo that picks and bites like mosquitoes in the murk on Vacio, another one that squeals panicked and off-kilter on Progreso Camicace, like the escape from those grooves will combust and kill it all. The vocals pull it back, hold it all barely together. They're so coarse, scarier even than the music, just in the emotion they eek out, rage laced with and deepened by grief, screaming over the dronepunk that bloodies on stubbornly, rumbling, repetitive as the throb from a wound, searing. Savage and painful and goddamn inept as all. On Metadona Records.