Tercer Mundo - Ser Nosotros Mismos

The first 12" from these Mexican punx, following on from their killer EP. Eight scrabbling hardcore punk tunes in a little under twelve minutes. Striking a balance between biting rawness and catchy rock and roll, Tercer Mundo have crafted one of the best punk releases of 2014. The title track opens mid-tempo, guitar whispers and a matter-of-fact sung-spoken vocals, before crashing apart, tumbling down into a pained bellowing. Similarly, Veijas Glorias runs an insistent post-punky riff around for a while until it as well blows up. Songs like Horrible Realidad are a thrumming tear from the off, but even then pulling back to redouble the scathing sonic attack. Tercer Mundo uses these punchy scuzz-forged hardcore punk to rip into the centre of a fucked society, to expose its ills, its crushing bleakness, and to find the dinged-up creaking human heart that lives and and burns within those fucked spaces.

 Opener Caidos sets the rage: "THEY HAVE FALLEN IN THIS WAR/THEY HAVEN'T GONE, STILL FIGHTING", closing in a defiant clatter: "THERE IS NO FEAR/THERE IS NO FEAR/THERE IS NO FEAR/FEAR DOESN'T EXIST" Not "I'm not afraid", but so burnt with the shitty state of things, with this "HORRIBLE REALITY OF HUNGER AND TORTURE/HORRIBLE REALITY OF DEATH AND INSANITY" as Horrible Realidad screams, as to transcend the terror of living, an zen fucked-offness, a purposeful unbreakable force. Maybe too broken right now, too beaten down by the work, the struggle ("ANXIETY TERRIFIES ME" admits Extincion, in an open moment) at times but still killing with feeling ("I DESPISE YOU WITH ALL MY STRENGTH" warns Te Desprecio) and still present in this place.

"WE DON'T FIT IN, IN THIS SHITTY SOCIETY! WE DON'T FIT IN, IN THIS STUPID CULTURE!" the title track states, but ending as a reaffirmation of the power of punk, in a society where violence infects each moment, to find a place, feeling the ugliness upfront and the strength buried deep within: "IN PUNK/WE WILL BE OURSELVES/IN PUNK/IT'S ALL WE HAVE LEFT/IN PUNK/WE WILL BE OURSELVES/IN PUNK/ALL FOR OURSELVES" That's where it is, that's where you can find the power, the drive, the last spark of energy to clench your hand into a fist and rise it to the sky. That's where they take all that balled-up fear, anxiety, stress at being cognizant in a shitstorm of cops and politicians and drugs, the swirling hateruck of capitalist violence, and beat it into rock to throw. "I HOPE THE DAY ARRIVES/IN WHICH MY SOUL EXPANDS" roars Sin Rostro Ni Corazon, cutting up streaming rawpunk brutality, with militaristic stamps. The world should be watching as the students and workers and people of Mexico explode with longheld anger at the sickening violence done unto them in the name of security and profit, as they continue the longstruggle that lives for and with us all, in many places, in many forms, in some places keener and far more dangerous than others, this is an album of frustration, this is an album of hope, this is an album of 'not yet', this is an album of 'but it will'.

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.

Aborticidio - s/t EP

Trashfuck noise from Mexico. Swankys by way of Ataque Frontal and M.E.L.I. 時々私は死ぬしたい is a deep ugly slop, barely held together. Basurales De Miseria is a pierching smear of cackle, cruddy fizz and drumsplats. Asdfghjk! rumbles and groans. "PUNK! I LOVE YOU MORE THAN MY LIFE!" it screams as it shouts about The Comes, Confuse and Gudon. Está Culero opens with the shitbass, breaks open the cockroachbox of feedback, kills and eats a rotten staticsqueal solo. Let's Dance to Noisepunk is tired old rocknroll riffs detourned bloodily, buried and burnt, like People's nutty Kyushu/Pistols-shuffle, but more unforgiving in its crashing inept harshness. Hellish, relentless, rudimentary, punk.

Los Monjo - La Vida Que Todos Envidian LP

Catchy Eskorbutan punk from a bunch of Mexican brothers (and a cousin) out on Discos MMM and Trabuc Records. Los Monjo are all about getting dug into you with those thick melodic basslines up front, cymbal rattles and guitar swishing away in the back, so low in songs like Herederos De Miseria as to sometimes feel like gentle crackling echoes. The vocals are sharp and mean, drawling, shouting, never mellow but never losing their biting clarity. Al Filo De Una Era chops through a mid-tempo Adolescents kinda groove, the catchy bass and perfect retreat, crouch and pounce dynamics of Adolescents' finest moments is all over this record. Rock Basura snatches one of those soulworm simple guitar lines and rides through on a courageous chug. La Vida Que Todos Envidian is eight new punk anthems to dance and nod to. These songs hit with the sweet tang of punk classics remembered, punk futures kicked into gear.

Cremalleras - s/t

Buzzfast punked-up two-piece thrashpop from Mexico. Curt punk songs that rattle around and hit with the quick crack of a dislocated joint being thwacked back into place. One of the first words I used to describe the band was 'zippy' and upon googling, turns out that Cremalleras is Spanish for 'zippers', much as I would like to take credit for some Joycean multilingual pun, I am not that smart, they just named their band well. From those sharp rising aaaahs on Ex-Novios and the shakearound shuffle of En Todos Lados to the rise and fall rumble of No Me Importa and the burntout caterwaul of Todo Esta Perdido, these songs pop with thin venom, danceable as much as they are aggressive, seducing and shimmying as much as they spit and crash, built from stark snippets of rough punk and sweet bouncy guitar thrum. On Cintas Pepe records.

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.