Los Saicos are a band from Peru that formed in the early ‘60s. The tunes that make up this compilation album were released as singles from 1965 and 66, and as far as I am aware these 12 songs constitute their entire catalogue. They recorded and performed for a little over a year, but as their population waned and the intense life of musicianhood proving too much, they disbanded. It’s quite convenient to experience a band’s entire career on one album, and there is a sense of completeness after having listened through a few times. I have always been fascinated by periods in the ‘60s and ‘70s where American music was being exported via vinyl records throughout the world en masse, inspiring local bands to interpret this - to them alien - genre with their own sound. Bands like WITCH from Zambia, Pescado Rabioso from Argentina, and Panbers from Indonesia, were all highly influenced by the psychedelic rock music that was coming into the country around this time.
The sound that Los Saicos were hearing was that of Elvis, Dick Dale, and early rock n roll, which they fused with peruvian folk and Latin rhythm. The vocals are sung by Erwin Flores on the upbeat numbers, which his growling, guttural voice serves well. The ballads are sung by César "Papi" Castrillón, who does a great croon. Flores’ vocals are striking, and he manages to produce a deep tone buried in his growls, similar to a Mongolian throat singer. The lyrics were designed to pack a punch, and it is easy to imagine the effect it would have had on the scene and youth at the time it hit airways on the mid ‘60s. Their sound, vocals, and outrageous lyrics makes them an important stage in the history of punk music, being a extremely early example of that kind of sound.
For example the lyrics to Demolición translate to:
We’d like to blow up the train station
Demolish, demolish, demolish, demolish
We’d like to blow up the train station
Demolish, demolish, demolish, demolish
Around the time the song was released, the band were arrested for descending upon the Lima City train station carrying pickaxes and prop bombs in a wild effort to promote the single.
The songs are brief, and have a definite surf rock flavour with the jangly guitars and the sorts of riffs they feature. One of my personal favourites, Cementerio has the narrator searching among coffins in a cemetery, and upon seeing a ghost, hides in a coffin. The songs climax comes with a corpse emerging and serving him beer from a skull. I mean what were people thinking when this came out, it really was something else. The start of the song even references Chopin’s funeral march. Pure genius.
Intensamente is fantastically dreamy sounding and surprisingly sophisticated in it’s construction for a band with such a raw unapologetic sound. I especially like how you can hear the crunch of the guitar amp breaking up. Guitar amps from the early ‘60s were very low gain, meaning to get them to distort you had to run them at their highest volumes, and the way they recorded it you can hear the amp was going LOUD.
Ana is one of the more familiar-sounding songs, following a typical R&B pattern from the period. The punk sound comes from the drums, which are mixed all but completely in the right speaker, and are borderline unhinged, and from the vocals, which drifts between gentle and raucous. Those are probably apt words to describe the whole record, gentle and raucous. I do think the raw sound can take a little time to adjust to, and it is worth playing with the EQ. When I switched the EQ to “Treble reducer” on my music player it sounded much fuller and punchier. It is short though, and well worth the effort.
Recommended Songs: Cementerio, Intensamente, Ana
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