Za! | website | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on January 29, 2016 via Hot Salvation Records / Audacious Art Experiment
Oh God, January is a depressing month isn’t it? The inevitable come down from Christmas and New Year, the return to work, the grey unrelentless skies, the weather. It really is the pits. Be thankful then, for Catalan Spanish duo Za! who are more than guaranteed to bring cheer and a shot in the arm to the broken tardy soul on these long winter nights with their new record Loloismo.
Za! are Spazzfrica Ehd (drums, keyboard, voice), and Papadupau (guitar, trumpet, sampler, voice), somehow I don’t think those are real names, whose mum calls them ‘Sapzzfrica’ for gawd’s sakes? But then the normal rules don’t apply to Za!. Take them, if you will, along the lines of duos like Lightning Bolt, or collectives like Japan’s Boredoms, or Mike Patton’s Mr Bungle, for here is a musical group that carve out their own rules. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Rulebook? Forget it! Loloismo at once lurches from industrial math-rock to rap, from Arabic influenced Spanish guitar to hardcore, with enough odd time-signatures to keep all you outsider music freaks happy. If they have any peers, then you’ll probably find them in the French bat-shit trio PoiL, if like me, you think of PoiL as shorthand for all that’s currently good in avant-garde psychedelic jazz-rock experimentation.
Za!’s approach on this record is wholly organic, taking as they do their basic set up, and manipulating the sound as they record the tracks – mostly live and in one take – with the odd special effect or vocal thrown in afterwards. It’s primal stuff partly due to the really very strong rhythmic elements on most of the tracks and also due to the fact that the vocals and choruses draw on the chants of sports crowds as their inspiration. ‘Loloismo’, as a concept in Spanish, is the collective act of singing, where the communal act of joining together to create noise or more broadly ‘a song’ is more important than the words or the song themselves. Spend anytime on the football terraces of a Saturday and you’ll know exactly what I, and indeed Za!, mean by this. Taken together they form a unique sounding band which, if not always sophisticated, certainly are in a class of their own.
Kicking off the album is ‘La Maquinaria Está Engrasada’ (roughly ‘The machinery is lubricated’), which is, for want of a better description, a shock-and-awe blast of manic percussion and treated guitars. Without coming up for air ‘Badulake’ continues this in a similar fashion, and if by now you’re not bouncing around the room, well, there’s little hope frankly. I can’t help feeling though that the best setting to experience Za! must be a live one.
‘Empatando’ follows a more electronic path than the opening two tracks swinging happily between trip-hop and jazz, while ‘Mundo Estrella’ (‘Star World’) has a fuzz-guitar work out that’s worthy of Jimmy Page, and again, will probably be a thing of greatness when experienced in the flesh. ‘Sancha’ takes things down tempo, to give us all a break we assume, before the lunacy is cranked up for the two-parter ‘Hablas Como Autechre’, which dominates the centre of the record. Taken together both parts make a satisfying and complex fulcrum to the record (and more than likely a homage to Rochdale’s own Rob Brown and Sean Booth, but, shamefully, I’m not so familiar with Autechre to know one way or another).
Title track, ‘Loloismo’, fully embraces the concept of collective chanting – even with no workable knowledge of Spanish I was able to sing along, ‘Captain Rondo’ is short and trippy, ‘Don Autoleyendas’ comes over all Public Enemy, before finishing off with ‘¡Aquí Huele A Assufre!’ in typical flamboyant style with a trumpet and didgeridoo intro that bursts into repetitive drumming the now familiar chanted vocals and distorted guitar. Clearly the band have some beef with someone or something at this point, but my Spanish was lacking so what it was’ll forever remain a mystery to me.
And having listened to the whole album, there’s also something of this band that reminds me of my favourites – Cardiacs – there’s a lot of music on the record that would satisfy any fellow member of The Pond. Not just music though, as a little digging reveals that Za! have existed for a unit for 10-years now, playing loads of live shows. Loloismo is – as far as I could tell – only the second full-length record (following on from 2013’s WANANANAI) released by the band in that time, so very like Tim Smith’s group of cult troubadours, Za!’s reputation relies on constantly playing live and cultivating a feverish cult following rather than commercial accolades. All-in-all this is a great record from a great band, let’s hope they don’t remain strangers to our shores for very long.
