INDIE ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Mesa Cosa make balls-out, garage-y punk rock.YaYa Brouhaha, the band’s long-playing debut, is a filthy piece of work. The Melburnians assume a total disregard for finesse, but that doesn’t mean there’s a deficiency in skills. Each ofYaYa Brouhaha’s ten tracks come out fast and hard, but the record’s lined with clever chord runs and a bounty of memorable gang vocals.
Opener ‘Why Yo’ sets the stage, shoving bottles down the gullet and unleashing a fit of accelerated mania. Frontman Pablo Alvarado is a Mexico City transplant and he doesn’t keep his heritage a secret. Take ‘Satanas’, for instance: in many respects a rampaging Cramps-meets-Minor Threat number, only it’s spiked with more than a touch of cocaine-addled Latino flavour. The same goes for ‘Bruja’,where Alvarado’s frenzied vocals verge on psychotic.
Towards its conclusion, YaYa Brouhaha sidesteps into a freakish six-minute episode called ‘Bad Blood’. Embodying the hangover from hell, the song snarls into view and plants a knife into your brain, again and again.
Such dynamic contrasts and aesthetic splicing push this LP beyond being a good old lark. YaYa Brouhaha is captivating and unpredictable, at once whipping you in the face, grinning deliriously and furnishing your belly with towers of beer.
4/5.
YaYa Brouhaha is out now through Off The Hip.
