Los Caidos - s/t (2011)

Seventeen years old, senior year of high school, and I’m at a punk show at Girls, Inc. in Newark, Delaware.  My friend Aaron’s band is playing.  He’s a recovering ska kid who’s been bumming rides home from me for the past few months.  Lately we’ve been hanging out in his room after school, listening to Mineral and Promise Ring records, talking about starting a female-fronted power pop band.  Aaron’s a guitar nerd who’s looking to play shows as often as possible.  I’m thinking that this kind of project might be a good change of pace from my goth band.  Anyway, I’ve recently started wearing blue jeans and white tee shirts.  Little by little I’m coming out of my shell.  I’m ready to drop my artistic pretenses for once, do something solely for the sake of fun.

But fun’s not what I think of when I go to shows at Girls, Inc.  This is where I was first exposed to zines, radical politics, veganism, crust punk and hardcore.  This is where I learned about the DIY ethos, the absolute necessity of screaming into a microphone, about how warm and comforting a roomful of sweaty, unwashed bodies can smell.  This is a place of catharsis, of dissonance, of power chords played loud and fast and tight.

These are not the values of Aaron’s band.  They’re all about wearing your heart on your sleeve, begging girls to be into you, getting your priorities mixed up, playing sloppy hooks and not giving a shit.

Halfway through their set, everyone in the band except the drummer has his pants down.  I ask myself: What the hell is this bullshit?

Aaron’s bass player quits a few weeks later.  Inexplicably, I offer to take his place.  I am in the band for over four years--as the frontman, no less.  Like any living being, the band grows and changes.  We embrace minor keys and odd time signatures and lyrics about more than just high school breakups and unrequited crushes.  Yet our emo past haunts us until the day we disband.  Our handful of loyal fans won’t let us abandon the songs close to their hearts.  During every show I am forced to sing lyrics that make me cringe:

You are a whisper

An anxious breath

You are falling through my fingers like water

Now I’m twenty-nine.  With varying degrees of enthusiasm and sincerity, I’ve been calling myself a punk for well over a decade.  But only recently have I been playing music that, from a purely aesthetic perspective, actually deserves the label.  Loud and fast and tight, with politically engaged lyrics.  It feels good and it feels right.  And I wonder how I got sidetracked.  How it took me so long to get back in touch with the things that drew me to this scene when I was barely past puberty.  

I discovered this demo here quite by accident.  Los Caidos sounds like the kind of band I always wished I had played in from ages seventeen through twenty-two.  Despite four years of high school Spanish and one semester of the language at a modest state school, I have no idea what the fuck the lyrics mean.  My hope is that these folks advocate for an uprising against the managerial class, American imperialism, the domination of the Global North, et al.  I hope they’re rebelling against whatever the fucked up Argentinian status quo may be.  Who knows.  I might ask around, do a few Google searches.  Maybe not.  But I will keep listening to these songs, reflect on my teen years, and do my best to convince myself that the fact that I’m a person of color in the U.S. somehow mitigates my complicity with the abhorrent foreign policy of the country of my birth.

As long as Los Caidos aren't shouting about broken hearts.