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Nasty, dark and raging hardcore from Mexico City.
Our take: Mexico City’s Ojo Por Ojo follows up their 2018 debut LP on La Vida Es Un Mus with this two-track flexi. When I first heard about this release, the thing that caught my eye was that Ojo Por Ojo recorded these tracks with Steve Albini. Yeah, the guy who recorded fucking In Utero! It’s not unheard of for Albini to record DIY punk bands (I remember he did a Vitamin X record a few years ago), but it seems like an unexpected choice for Ojo Por Ojo. While their first LP wasn’t particularly raw in terms of fidelity, it was extremely raw in other senses. Like singer / guitarist Yecatl Peña’s previous band, Inservibles, a sense of desperation pervades Ojo Por Ojo’s music. It’s like the hardcore equivalent of a Goya painting: stark, gritty, and deeply emotional, with Peña’s tortured scream evoking similar feelings as Goya’s famous painting of Saturn devouring his son. The worry would be that a famous producer would somehow smooth out these rough edges, but Albini turns out to be a perfect choice because he doesn’t smooth out rough edges… he sharpens them. Rather than Goya’s blurred, painterly canvases, here Ojo Por Ojo renders the nightmare with the clinical clarity of a high-resolution digital photograph. I wish it were more than two songs, but on the other hand, something this intense might be best in small doses.
Our take: Mexico City’s Ojo Por Ojo follows up their 2018 debut LP on La Vida Es Un Mus with this two-track flexi. When I first heard about this release, the thing that caught my eye was that Ojo Por Ojo recorded these tracks with Steve Albini. Yeah, the guy who recorded fucking In Utero! It’s not unheard of for Albini to record DIY punk bands (I remember he did a Vitamin X record a few years ago), but it seems like an unexpected choice for Ojo Por Ojo. While their first LP wasn’t particularly raw in terms of fidelity, it was extremely raw in other senses. Like singer / guitarist Yecatl Peña’s previous band, Inservibles, a sense of desperation pervades Ojo Por Ojo’s music. It’s like the hardcore equivalent of a Goya painting: stark, gritty, and deeply emotional, with Peña’s tortured scream evoking similar feelings as Goya’s famous painting of Saturn devouring his son. The worry would be that a famous producer would somehow smooth out these rough edges, but Albini turns out to be a perfect choice because he doesn’t smooth out rough edges… he sharpens them. Rather than Goya’s blurred, painterly canvases, here Ojo Por Ojo renders the nightmare with the clinical clarity of a high-resolution digital photograph. I wish it were more than two songs, but on the other hand, something this intense might be best in small doses.