MESS – SOMOS MESS

This album, we’re told, brings together the entirety of MESS‘s recorded output between 2020 & 2022, from the band’s inception to their last recordings prior to their debut album. It’s all freshly laundered and remastered and a lot of it hasn’t been available before, so as an historical document, it is an important artefact in the display case of Mexican punk rock. But what is it like as an album? Well, bonus points for touching on most of the bases of second wave punk. Opener True Love is old school shouty punk from the UK Subs school. Street Boys veers into tuneful powerpop of the kind popularised by the Good Vibrations stable, but topped with that raspy Jimmy Pursey vocal. Authoritarian Tools has an early Skids feel with a dash of GBH. The Only Judge tips its hat to Pursey again. Sospecha brings The Exploited to the genre party with Blown To Bits riffing. Don’t Look Back deploys a simple and effective chord sequence, tunefully looping its way round for two-and-a-half minutes.

There’s a slight stylistic switch for I Don’t Like You where the guitarist has suddenly acquired a hatful of effects pedals and used them all at once on what can only be described as the Subs covering Jilted John. Liar returns to simple riffing and Bleak Days morphs the polished guitar figures of Chron Gen into another battering old school punk tune. Fuego, Fuego, Fuego is surely a mosh pit favourite. The Lad is not, alas, the song about penises that Father Ted fans might have hoped for. It is instead a tuneful, shoutalong anthem – with a sort of speeded-up Warhead feel. FTW (For The Win) kicks off promisingly with sinister jangling Department S intro before disintegrating into another Exploited-a-like gallop. True Hate evokes every band with ’77’ in their name and Traidores (traitors) doesn’t veer much from the established pattern. Closing track Excuses brings an SLF edge to the MESS canon.

This would be an OK album in any collection. Two-minute bursts of derivative punk rock that sounds kinda familiar. Maybe that’s its charm – no challenges, nothing startlingly new. Production-wise, the over-reliance on guitar effects does detract from the songs themselves. The good ideas are spread pretty thin. But that’s OK too – no-one asked MESS to produce grandiose punk rock operas. Catchy and raw punk rock it is, and on that basis, well worth a punt. If you’re curious to know what the time difference between Guadalajara and the UK is, it’s 7 hours and 45 years. They don’t make the future like they did in the past.

SOMOS MESS is now available on vinyl through Pirates Press Records and via digital platforms.