Los Llamarada / Gone Gone Cold

S-s Records

“Things are ok here but this year there wasn't a Christmas truce. In fact the city woke up on Dec 31 with the news of a dead topless woman hanging from a bridge in one of the main avenues. The woman (nicknamed The Redhead) was part of a gang of kidnappers, had been in prison for some months, and had been ‘rescued’ a few days before by an armed squad while being taken to the hospital for some unnecessary tests. It seems like her rescuers didn't want her to speak, or weren't really her friends to start with. The pictures were everywhere and very graphic. By that same night people were making jokes about The Redhead being a New Year's piñata.” Thus begins one of the dozens of emails from Monterrey, Mexico’s LOS LLAMARADA to S.S. Records during the recording of their third and final album, Gone Gone Cold. Since their first album on S.S., The Exploding Now!, Llamarada has made some of the most striking psychedelic punk of the last decade. In the spirit of Red Crayola and 13th Floor Elevators, Llamarada approach to psych is devoid of rules, trends, or convention. Like Mars, they feel their way through sound, finding songs in the playing. However, while The Exploding Now! and their second album, Take the Sky, reflect the band’s (then) excitement with their future and possibility, Gone Gone Cold looks at present day Mexico and its never-end Drug War. On Gone Gone Cold, fans of Los Llamarada will hear their oft-noted claustrophobic sound, but the songs a less settled than before. Confusion trumps structure, until a riff or pulse builds in intensity and the song enters into panic. Or a song starts at a panicked pace and unravels into a single phrase. There still is the subverted surf-guitar and male/female chant/vocals, but the drums are stronger and keyboards more insistent—sounds desperate for a way out. Some song titles: “He Was Killed,” “There is No Ending,” “All Gods Collapse,” “Inside much poetry as they are song lyrics—frustrated, enraged, and depressed, but also Cold is Los Llamarada’s mirror of Mexico and their besieged hometown of Monterrey, noise over death and of art over war. Packaged in Stoughton "old style" tip-on sleeve Cold is the best psychedelic reaction to war since Red Crayola’s “War Sucks.”

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