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“Peace Talks Continue as do the Fables”
La Misma’s previous release, 2015’s “Kanizadi” LP, showed them harnessing and controlling their initial fury, utilizing Crisis’ musical toolkit to transform blasts of Ultimo Resorte-styled hardcore punk into something more tense and restrained. Three years later, Misma have dragged this formula all the way through their spiritual desert, achieving a masterful, lean tightness that is more desperate and ragged in its intensity than anything else they’ve yet done. Militant drums fire bleak, dirty melodies into states of stark chaos, as fierce Portuguese declarations ride the bucking storm. Over the years La Misma have mastered their unique sound, and this venomy and reckless incarnation is their most powerful and impressive work yet. Another necessary record by a necessary band.
Our take: Has it really been three years since La Misma’s excellent debut LP? I guess it has… time flies! As one might expect given such a long gap between releases, Negaciacoes doesn’t sound exactly like La Misma’s older releases, though the sound is similar. The core is still based in the Toxic State sound, but what I like about La Misma—particularly on this release—is how loose and jammy they are. In my own bands, we compose everything meticulously… when we write songs we decide to play this riff four times, then that one six, and on and on until the end of the song, and we play it the same way every time. However, La Misma’s songs are more fluid and organic, like they’re based around grooves rather than composed as discrete sections and then welded together. Consequently, there’s something about La Misma’s music that reminds me more of Fun House-era Stooges or Can, although on the surface they sound nothing like either of those groups. What they have in common is that each song has a groove. The groove is the song's core and the rest of the band works around it. You might hear a catchy lead guitar melody pop out for a second or the vocals might come out front for a little bit, but the groove is persistent and keeps the songs chugging along with a motorik-esque hypnotic quality. The band foregrounds that unique aspect of their playing on this EP, and consequently it's more realized and original than La Misma’s previous releases, which were already outstanding. As always with Toxic State you also get cool packaging packed with artwork and information (including English translations of the lyrics, which is always helpful for those of us trapped in our monolingual bubbles), so here’s another one on Toxic State that gets the “highly recommended” tag.