Los Saicos

Reviews

Los Saicos Single Box Set 8×7″

An absolute monster box set (pun intended). Smash hit after smash hit of the legendary Peruvian band. The thing covers their whole career so you can appreciate the richness of their sound: the caveman vocals, the reverb-rich riffs, the wild BO DIDDLEY-esque beats.  I’m not so fond of the whole exercise of historical revisionism the band has suffered and benefited from but, I think they may well be the only band worthy of that sort of intellectual procedure. They truly are a great band and they did anticipate sounds and motifs from the punk era.  This is teenage angst as a form of art. Enjoy the marvelous sounds of LOS SAICOS.

Los Saicos El Mercenario / Un Poquito de Pena 7″

Oh, LOS SAICOS, great representatives of Peruvian sonic teenage terrorism. This pair of songs came after “DemoliciÁ³n” and “Entierro de los Gatos” and all those great classics that led them to be retroactively read as the originators of punk rock. We’ve almost got a new band here, as there’s only two original members left, Erwin Flores and César “Papi” CastrillÁ³n, who recorded these songs together with other musicians for a local Peruvian label in the distant year of 1969. The Spanish label Munster Records is in charge of the reissue and it has everything we came to love about the Los Saicos sound. “El Mercenario” is a mind-blowing tale of a mercenary, who embarks to Africa in order to commit atrocities as a soldier for hire only to realize the futility and damage he caused, leading him to commit suicide; the story is narrated by a voice somewhere between a ballad singer and a young amphetamine user with euphoric screams marking “1, 2, 3, 4″ as a kind of cool vocal hook, plus guitars with dark surfer vibes. On the other side, “Un Poquito de Pena” is a love ballad with intense singing, arpeggiated and extremely melodic guitar riffs, a true gem that could’ve been included in one of those Back From The Grave comps. Great single that deserves to be on par with the rest of LOS SAICOS’ work.

Los Saicos ¡Demolición! / Lonely Star 7″

Many record and band reviews (mine mostly) spend space name-dropping other bands and styles that a reviewee sounds like and borrows from. It’s a kind of connect the musical dots. Because let’s face it, we’re all influenced in some way by what we’ve heard before. But there are those trailblazers and avant-gardes who every now and then create something strikingly new from the same twelve notes we’re all shuffling around, using nothing but their own instincts. LOS SAICOS were operating out of Lima, Peru from 1964–66 with limited access to outside music or the happenings in England or the United States at the time. Their proto-punk sound with sharp guitar riffs and screaming vocals pre-dates the STOOGES, SEX PISTOLS, and RAMONES by a decade, though the band remained in obscurity, almost as an in-the-know secret among garage punkers. The early-aughts saw a brief reunion, along with numerous articles and a few documentaries that brought them back into current consciousness. BLACK LIPS and many many other similarly-styled bands cite them as a major influence. This 7″ is a reissue of two of their early singles, a great musical artifact that couldn’t care less if punk was born in London or NYC.