Pitchfork
March 21, 2011
Link
7.7
For the right kind of fuzzed-out rock band, gaining a bigger audience doesn't have to mean leaving the garage. Sure, these days plenty of lo-fi acts-- from Wavves to Dum Dum Girls to Cloud Nothings-- have left the scuzzy sonics behind, as Pitchfork contributor Martin Douglas recently noted over at Passion of the Weiss. And it definitely works when, say, Smith Westerns embrace swooning Britpop balladry, because those Chicago glam-brats' songs already had a certain teen-dream sweetness to them. But their former tourmates Davila 666 are a different case. You wouldn't hire a big-budget remixer to scrub the grit out of "Wild Thing" or "Louie Louie", would you?
Like its Nuggets-crushing forebears, this Puerto Rican six-piece earns a place on your next house-party playlist with sheer anarchic energy, not to mention a formidable gift for language-transcending hooks. On Davila 666's underrated 2008 self-titled debut album-- plus a handful of vinyl-only releases for HoZac, Douchemaster, and Rob's House-- they established themselves as gleefully filthy purveyors of indecipherably catchy garage-pop. Thankfully, Tan Bajo doubles down on the group's strengths, delving deeper into screeching sonic chaos while adding an even more memorable batch of songs to shout along with, whether or not you understand the words.
That means Davila 666's sophomore album is still rowdy enough for an impromptu weekend binge with a few friends, but it also offers enough carefully crafted tunes and feedback-streaked textures to fill your headphones. Stylistic tropes from classic 1960s girl groups complement raucous guitar licks on harmony-drenched "Yo Seria Otro", with its call-and-response verses and touches of strings, as well as on waltz-time "¡Diablo!", with its brutally earnest spoken-word section. Meanwhile, the Velvets-JAMC scree explored on the earlier "Ella Dice" only expands on the hypnotically pounding "Si Me Vez..." or the instant-earworm advance mp3 "Esa Nena Nunca Regreso". When the band breaks into a full Ramones sprint on "Mala" or "Patitas", anyone with a playground-level knowledge of Spanish can still catch the gist: mierda, caliente, cerveza, cucaracha. That said, at plenty of times Davila 666 continue to delight in their inscrutability, as on the distantly crooned opener or the chocolate-jingle hidden track-- inside jokes, maybe? In any event, such dumb fun is a necessary part of what the train-whistling, irrepressibly hey-hey-ing "Los Cruces" reminds us, in a rare English-language moment, is only "rock'n'roll."
