Labels: Superfluous – Tron-U-Sound
Review by: Milos Vukcevic
Los Platanos are an Alicante punk band, here offering two short tracks of tuneful garage at hardcore speeds, with slightly blown-out production. The guitars are nice and treble-scratchy, and the impassioned/screamed vocals sound like they’re coming from a transistor-radio inside a concrete mixer or similar slowly rotating metal receptacle. The first tune is slightly more poppy – coming across as a more up-to-date Gorilla Angreb with male vox. The second cut is rougher in approach, with some good response shouts. Kudos to the bass player for a convincing performance throughout. For my ears this could have been a little more blown-out and 10-15% faster – but these tracks are both sick. The thanks to communism and drugs in the insert makes me wish I could understand the Spanish lyrics.
Venereans from Valencia were a real treat; mid-paced, surf damaged punk with the ocassional reverb flourish. “Terminal Beach” kicks off with a bassline that reminded me of Klaus Flouride, with some nice Beefheartian dissonant guitar, then into a mashed potato chorus. The whole time there’s a nice production touch of a reverby instructive shout in the background. The second track is more of the similar, but straighter and with another killer chorus. Some blurb I found on the net mentioned that the Venereans can’t decide whether they want to be Dead Kennedys or the Kinks, but I’d change that Kinks for “Safe as Milk” Beefheart, and then add a touch of Angry Samoans for the speed and production values. They have an LP on Tic Tac Totally – which you can download in its entirety from http://venereans.bandcamp.com/ – and which contains both these cuts.
There are 300 clear copies of this split, and it’s a split release between German label Superfluous and Spanish label Tron-U-Sound.