The Quietus | Reviews | Maya Birds

It seems fitting that a group as messy and messy as Birds Of Maya records an album in 2014, and then… forget it a bit. Presumably the tapes were left on a high shelf, buried under an avalanche of t-shirts stained with holes or hidden behind piles of slowly yellowing old newspapers in the basement.

As most of a decade has passed, the music still remains as timeless anachronistic: a worn out and fucked up walking corpse that lets out an anti-cool rock daddy, a garage rock growl and the sweet smell- salty adult men quivering with pearls on the well-stitched pages of vintage Marshall catalogs.

If none of this looks pretty, it’s because it is not. Valdez is a rowdy, punchy bully who solemnly summons the ghosts of classic rock to point fingers, sneer, and mock them. At one point, they aggressively launch something that looks like On the beach– Era Neil Young attacking The Doors’ ‘Five To One’, the next deadly shit kick of something that could have been Shocking Blue’s’ Send Me A Postcard ‘.

Things creak, growl, and neigh with great effort and surrender, with the band’s labors reaching a sweet spot somewhere between Mudhoney and The Groundhogs. Sometimes they stretch so far for landless music group levels of transcendence that you might just hear their vertebrae pop – if it weren’t, of course, so scary. strong.

As with the mud peddled by Endless Boogie and Liquorball, the psyche, rock and blues served here are deeply aberrant. Open hostility and nervous paranoia pretty much sideline concepts as quaint as “good vibes,” and Birds Of Maya remain the same band that was too ugly to be swept away by the independent world’s brief flirtation with Comets On Fire. Likewise, they’re far too bizarre to satisfy the amber-trapped tastes of the stoner rock ensemble, and if their pelvic-hitting aggressiveness speaks to punk rock, it’s just too hard to imagine thugs out there. the spiky jacket dyeing their Totalitär and pogo tees to bastard riffs from Captain Beyond.

Quite where it leaves Valdez in 2021, everyone’s guessing – most likely sliding between the cracks where grease accumulates and bad pennies are temporarily lost. That this could be the case seems a shame as the stupidity of the group often comes close to genius, but you can’t help but think that maybe it is water in the mill for them – as long as the riffs don’t. stop spinning and the sweat dripping from the walls tastes like beer, all is well with the world.