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RATA NEGRA from Madrid deliver twelve songs of dark, crude and moody punk on their debut LP. Formed of members from JUANITA Y LOS FEOS and LA URSS this power trio have distilled the negativity and uncertainly of the young Spanish generation and transformed it into perfectly crafted punk songs. Sharply turning snaps of daily life into melodic anthems for a doomed generation, musically RATA NEGRA fence between dark melodic OC punk a la RIKK AGNEW solo debut album and Spanish Punk ’83 via KGB/ VULPESS. Imagine the non keyboard tracks of Yugoslavian KAOS mixed with LA’S X melody, add to it a layer of distortion and a dose of vital desperation and you get close to RATA NEGRA’s sound.
Oído Absoluto comes housed in a reverse board sleeve with printed inner. Both designed by guitarist Fa of Croke Studio and it is released as a collaboration between Beat Generation in Madrid and La Vida Es Un Mus Discos in Hackney.
Our take: After a solid debut 7", here's the big vinyl from this Spanish band, and it steps things up considerably. From the first few seconds that I heard the opening track, "Ratas," I knew that I was going to be hearing a lot of this band over the coming months / years. You know that feeling when a band seems to hit upon a sound that everyone wants to hear at the moment? Like Masshysteri did around the time they started up, or when the No Hope for the Kids LP came out, or the first Hank Wood & the Hammerheads LP... you hear it and you know that everyone is going to freak out about it and you're going to be hearing it at parties, on the PA between bands, etc., constantly for the next year or two? Well, Rata Negra have that... people are going to freak out about this. You may recognize the members from Juanita Y Los Feos and La Urss, and really Rata Negra sound like a mash-up of those two bands, taking the propulsive post-punk-informed instrumentation of La Urss and combining it with the infectious vocals of Juanita Y Los Feos. The music is good, but the singer is the key element here... she has a real gift for melody and harmony that's leagues beyond what virtually any other singer in punk is capable of. It's not like she's Mariah Carey or anything, but these are real songs, not just some jabroni yelling at you. And despite all of our posturing about noise not music, we want real songs. Rata Negra give us those real songs and we will love them for it. Highly recommended.