Mid-Sixties garage rock seems in retrospect to have been a grassroots movement on a truly global scale. Forty-five years on, obsessive labels like Munster and QDK Media are still unearthing lost curios, originating from ever more remote and unlikely locations. Who’d have thought that healthy garage scenes thrived in Cambodia and Iran? In comparison, Peru is pretty mainstream by now, a number of compilations having documented the vibrant South American scene over the years. Much of the stuff that surfaces these days is unsurprisingly a bit second division, but the groovy cats at Munster have stumbled across a little gem with this collection.
¡Demolición! comprises the entire recorded output (all six singles!) of Lima’s most disturbed delinquents, Los Saicos (…and I didn’t need online translation to figure out either group name or album title!). For the purists (and really, who else would be interested?), the release comes in the original format of six 7” records as well as the less sexy CD and download options. The twelve tracks were all originally released during 1965 and 1966 and show a spirited primitivism with admirably little development between debut single “Come On” to farewell hit “Besando a Otra” a year later.
Munster’s claim that Los Saicos make The Sonics sound like Simon and Garfunkel is something of an exaggeration, and to talk of them as being as seminal as The Stooges or Rocket from the Tombs clearly displays severe enthusiasm O.D. All the same, for a hitherto undiscovered garage combo, they certainly seem to have been very good and must have really rocked live.
Anyone with affection for the wilder end of primitive garage (and who hasn’t?) will find much to love on ¡Demolición! and will be more than happy to file it lovingly alongside their Monks and Sonics platters.
-Alan Holmes-
3 thoughts on “Los Saicos – ¡Demolición!”
I wouldn’t call Los Saicos “undiscovered” exactly. Maybe they are to you. But DJs at garage rock clubs and festivals have been spinning their 45s for quite some time now. I’ve seen original 45s on the turntables at the Dirty Water Club in London and at the Funtastic Dracula Carnival in Valencia and The Primitive Festival in Rotterdam, amongst other places.
Good on the Dirty Water Club and the others for keeping this sort of material in the public ear, including on their radio show too. It’s because of clubs like DW and the festivals you mention that there’s enough interest in music four decades old to warrant this re-release now, and to enable a new generation – even of people who were old enough to have heard it twenty or more years ago – to discover Los Zaicos and other bands afresh.
Good on the Dirty Water Club and the others for keeping this sort of material in the public ear, including on their radio show too. It’s because of clubs like DW and the festivals you mention that there’s enough interest in music four decades old to warrant this re-release now, and to enable a new generation – even of people who were old enough to have heard it twenty or more years ago – to discover Los Saicos and other bands afresh.