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If the Bad Brains were from the US-Mexico borderlands they would’ve sounded like Vicio. Full stop. Latinx youth from the streets of Laredo pumping out tracks to smash border walls. You should have picked this up when it was a demo tape back in 2000, but you didn’t. This is the final Emma Navajas Records release, twenty years in the making. Eight tracks of wake-the-f-up Latinx hardcore in Spanish. The drums hit like a marching snare, a call to rise up and confront racism and fascism, which in case you haven’t noticed is alive and well in 2020 as it was for these border youth twenty years ago. Musically speaking, if you wanna geek out, listen closely to this record and its colors and tones. Roberto has a signature bass tone that so many bands today try to get. When you hear it, you’ll ask what the kids asked back then: "How do you get that tone?" That’s not something you can just get. That tone was created out of necessity and urgency, for then as much as for today.
EB Thoughts on this record:
Although this is not an Extinction Burst release, being the distributor of this final Emma Navajas record is the next best thing. The Emma Navajas label has brought us the DESCARADOS 12" e.p., SIN ORDEN's "Arte, Cultura Y Resistencia" LP and VENGANZA's "Tus Heroes No Son Los Mios" e.p. and now after 20 years, VICIO has received a proper vinyl release. Imagine the rawness of Los Saicos thrown in with the urgency of the Bad Brains and you would hold in your hand the Vicio 7". Although only four releases on the label, Emma Navajas was very selective to what it released and wouldn't release bands just for the sake of releasing punk music, but rather release four urgent records that they felt needed to be heard and documented. Extinction Burst felt this release was so important to the history of Latinx punk, that we've designed a Curatorial Sounds insert to go with it. Important, urgent and relevant, you need this in your arsenal now.
Our take: This is a vinyl reissue of a demo tape from Texas’s Vicio, originally released in the year 2000. While clueless white people like myself were freaking out over “Y2K thrash” and chasing down Tear It Up pressing variants, these Texans were channeling the unhinged spirit of early Italian hardcore, blasting out these eight tracks of primitive punk. Sometimes the drummer drifts away from the beat and the bass and guitar are out of tune with one another, but the riffs are killer and the band is playing like it’s the last time they’ll ever touch instruments in their lives. I don’t know if the members of Vicio were familiar with bands like Wretched and Negazione, but they captured something on tape that evokes the same feeling as those bands. Major props to the folks who brought this recording back into circulation… you’ve done the world a service.