AYUCABA - Demo 01 CS

Slime punk, egg punk, egg. Chain wave, chain punk, and, eventually, inevitably, similarly, just chain. Does this help? Make more sense? No no no, just keep throwing some shit at the wall so every review sounds like a sales pitch and every band is a camel comprised of diametric sonic interests. D-beat, kang, raw, D-beat raw, UK82; female fronted, fast hardcore, fastcore; Devocore (that's a thing! The author's sweating!)

Oh, good grief, let's not turn this first outing of mine into a referendum on meaningless sub-genre delineations and unfortunate sartorial preferences and let's talk what really matters: vision. Ayucaba's got it. A big, loud, screaming vision that warns of (or, perhaps, beckons) doomsday, strong enough to reverberate from the far flung era of 2023. The vocals, strained and menacing, employ tasteful reverb without becoming the coward's blanket many in America seem to cozy up under, with the bassist chiming in now and again to drive home a point. The guitars are heavy as life, one holds it down with catchy riffs, the other wanks and shreds, while the bassist took a page from THE SHITLICKERS guidebook on good-bassing and stabbed a few holes in the speakers before taking the fucker to the killing floor and back. The drums roll on like a fucking warmachine.

As American assimilation robbed me of my mother tongue(s), I took a break from writing to translate every song, and what a discovery!: AYUCABA, a word that that earlier forced assimilation could not eradicate. In Guariní, "the one that kills you." AYUCABA, a, forgive me, patron saint to those still fighting, still resisting, the lodestone that holds up the entire vision this five piece has constructed. And those lyrics, like the music: big, heavy, a double edged blade: one sharp to cut, one dull to punish. My personal favorite goes something like "I still know how to look up and spit on them from below."

Now, time being, the downside to the vision is you just have to take my word for it. The band has elected to withhold their music from the digital sphere in all capacities, but I'm working on getting my shit situated in a way that will allow me to rip tapes and rekkids, at which point we'll get this shared amongst us vermin.

There are some live recordings that I highly recommend floating around out there, so peep those in the meantime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVACUcYkZ6Y and https://zaratazarautz.bandcamp.com/album/ayucaba-2024-03-21.

Anyways, uh, foreign language, metal-tinged raw punk from South American ex-pats in Spain, or something.