I've written a few pieces on my
admiration for various Central and South American metal bands and the
manner in which they could absorb the severity of their circumstances
into their music, transmuting it into an extremity paralleled by few
other artists before or since. Bands like Parabellum, Herpes, and
Hadez all churned out some of the most vicious, atonal, bomb-blast
anti-music ever commited to tape but I would hate to imply that all
the brutality of authoritarian regimes, drug-fuled corruption, and
some of the bloodier moments of Cold War spillover necessarily forced
musicians into the realms of quasi-listenable discordance. There
were antecedents, unique for their time and place but not really
remembered for the boundary pushing of their harsher followers.
V8 is one such band. They're widely
believed to be Argentina's first metal band and it's not hard to pick
out what they were attempting. Their first album, 1983's Luchando
Por El Metal (Fighting
For Metal – for those unversed
in Spanish) almost seems a sort of missing link between late NWOBHM
and early speed metal, but whereas the former genre was comprised of
bands who tended to release a killer EP or two and then either fall
apart or make an album consisting mainly of shitty filler material
and the latter focused more on technical ability and falsetto vocals,
Luchando Por El Metal is
rock solid and stocked front to back with well-written catchy tunes,
almost punk-ish in their rawness, not a million miles removed from a
rougher Kill 'Em All (which
was released four months later).
My Spanish is a bit rusty, but from what I can tell V8's hatred of both society and hippies was surpassed only by their devotion to heavy metal (the introduction to “Parcas Sangrientas” gives way to the heavily accented shout of “HEAVY MET-AL!” in case there was any question or doubt where their alliegences lay). And it may be easy to have a laugh at the single-mindedness of it all except for two things: first, in 1979 Argentina was still a military dictatorship that had withstood decades of de facto civil war, withV8 forming during the most repressive era of that regime's rule, a time when rock music was banned and anybody performing it did so at their own peril – imprisonment and forced disappearances were the order of the day – making the act of being in a metal band one requiring a level of bravery most musicians would have trouble mustering; and second, the album fucking rules. It's a total ripper, a rager, a torpedo bonzer, and ass-pounder of the highest order. Anybody who claims to like awesome things and doesn't like this needs to take a good, long look at themselves in the mirror and try to figure out where their head's at.
V8 may
have had some analogs in the Motörheads and Judas Priests of the
world, but to say their music wasn't new or different not only isn't
really the point, but it lays bare the cultural privelege at the
heart of being able to denigrate the relevance of something because
it's reminiscent of something else. V8 was
new and different, at least in relation to their corner of the world,
and their popularity there attests to the vacuum that they filled for
the generation of people who needed something as bracing, cathartic,
and anarchic as metal to be able to come to terms with a social
structure so rigorously and vehemently opposed to the freer
expressions of the human spirit. Also it fucking rules.
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