LA OTRACINA is unquestionably the band of the week.
What is the criteria for this doubtlessly dubious distinction? Ill-defined at best. It’s tempting to simply capture the words of the promotional sticker on the band’s “Blood Moon Riders” album, which states the following:
“Inverted progressive surf rock, liberated from psychedelic epithets.”
It’s tempting to say any band willing to lay down that kind of mission statement – to invoke the spirit of liberation, progression, inversion and an alternate dimension wherein The Ventures crash-landed on Venus the same night Buddy Holly joined the choir invisible – should be the band of the week.
Why resist the temptation? No reason at all – beyond the fact that La Otracina is not just any band, and this point cannot be stressed strongly enough. Liberated from psychedelic epithets, Brooklyn’s La Otracina wins the space race the old-fashioned way: by turning the Orange amps up to twelve and proceeding to split your brain clean in half, moving seamlessly through an entire galaxy of riff-tactic solar flares and a backbeat you can really dance (if you’re into that sort of thing).
Power-trio? Yes. Massive walls of guitar heroics spread perfectly across an incalcuable hooks-per-minute ratio? Yes, yes. Killers of reality, or bringers of the new dawn? Doesn’t matter. Define your own reality. Alan Watts says reality is just a Rorshach inkblot. La Otracina is the band of the week, and they say reality has got to die.
Download: LA OTRACINA – “Beyond the Smoke” (from the “Beyond the Smoke” August ’09 Tour CD-R)
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.” – Alan Watts
Revolt of the Apes 
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