GUACALA LOS MODERNOS Y SU ELECTRO, WHITE NINJA
Records Are Dead, Mexico ****
Rating: 86
By Carlos Reyes
Ripping soaring tracks prove to be more than pure cacophonous noise in White Ninja’s opera prima, the revealing Guacala los Modernos y su Electro is nothing short than exhilarating. Frenzied from beginning to end, this is an accessible and complex first album, one of those rare findings that although tiny on the surface, bring variation to Mexico’s exceedingly modular rock scene. White Ninja is a project by Leo Marz who is also member of Monterrey’s very own pop extraordinaire band Album, he has also recruited Richi Garage in the drums and Monterrey’s terrible-enfant, religiously messed up kid Alexico, who adds crazy random, and not so random lyrics to these songs.
White Ninja is urgent and quantized, loud but melodically logical, sings of math rock as opposed to mad rock. From the album cover, one learns to register a sense of sequencing, expect this kind of continuum in six cerebral pieces that seem to desire liberation from their own quantization. Not that these songs are constrained per say, but they’re folded and outspreaded marvelously. In this sense, we can think of Guacala Los Modernos y Su Electro as a self-resolving album. Luckily, the aesthetics here still hold up a confrontational stance on evenness which makes the record much more exciting. This is less gritty and loud than the stuff from Nene Records, but there are plenty of pedals and variations to embrace it as a post-punk kind of record.
The album is skillfully organized following a theme: “No Retreat, No Surrender.” Each track is separated by two-second intermissions shouting the theme over and over. Perhaps they lack a bit of the scene-locality esteem that a bands like New Age have, but this it sure compromises to Monterrey’s hot indierock scene. Such is the case in “MDTCS” with Alexico screaming “hay muchas bandas que cantan en ingles”, it never goes deeper than that but they do register such trend and have a blast doing so. After a deferment intro, White Ninja quickly embellishes its sound in “Zombie Town”, one of the album’s peaks so huge (as huge as T.I.) that it can only been seen as a track assembled (rather than thought) on blueprint ideas, layers and roars.
The band could be described as a series of adrenaline rushes, well backed up by jammed technos and unbounded clutter. “Shizzleizzle” is a nice place to determine if the band’s over hyper approach is adequate or exhausted; there’s no fatigue here, those many layers and sequence repetitions acquire a purpose, to blow or maybe scratch those modern minds of yours. “Vitacilina” captures the modern listener’s chances for/to information, “todo esta en la red, bájalo tu mismo.” The most serious age arrives with “Fuck B”, a highly explosive track with cut-above bold measures. The final track, “No Retreat No Surrender” encloses the album’s feed on momentum, accidental and impulsive urges. Sick!