Hear Me Out: ‘La Araña Es La Vida’ remains the most overlooked masterpiece of the last 10 years
La Araña Es La Vida is a record that swaggers into the barroom in a leather jacket prised from a bovine beast that clearly took great pride in itself.
It’ll steal your date and cook them eggs in the morning. Its jawline is made of chiselled marble. Your voice cracks when you attempt to say hello. It’s how rock ‘n’ roll should be.
When Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds released it back in 2016, their trusted leader was drawing to the end of a flurry of activity. The former Gun Club, Cramps and Bad Seeds man was awash with such creativity that it may well have inadvertently driven the album towards its relative obscurity. A victim of ‘difficult to keep track of’ syndrome.
But beyond that, King Congo Powers had also seen his style so heavily stolen in the ten years or so prior to its release, thanks to the rise of streaming exposing new bands to bygone subcultures more readily than ever, that its coolness was quelled by weekend imitators.
In the years that have followed, it has shunned those wannabes aside, and stood firm as the Real McCoy of swaggering rock ‘n’ roll substance, while those that once ‘had a bash’ at being a band and living in a cold water apartment have decided to move closer to Dartford again so that mummy and daddy can help with the childcare.
You see, the bristling coolness of La Araña Es La Vida was backed by timeless musical class. It’s baroque music played by a punk band. It’s minimalism filled with nuance. In other words, it follows its own rules and creates a strange, swampy underground world in the process.
The Stooges certainly hang out in this swamp with their sound writ large across the record as a proud influence. But it drags the proto punks down to a subterranean world in Mexico where things get strange and colourful. This continuous lustre turns the record into the sort of underground bar where, after a few drinks, you can no longer find the stares to the door and world beyond, entombed by some peculiar, beery womb for wanderers.
When you give in to the entrancement and listen to the stories of the patrons, you find there’s depth there too. Disembodied heads of the most androgynous sort, Elvis Presley’s karate monkey, weird planets, and all manner of things that you can’t even begin to understand swirl in this heady cocktail of kaleidoscopic intoxication. The tastiest beer on tap perhaps being ‘La Araña’ itself, a song as perfect for cooking along to as it is for jogging.
Kid Congo Powers, along with bassist Kiki Solis, drummer Ron Miller and guitarist Mark Cisneros, came together as an all-star band modest and creative enough to cut an album at The Harveyville High School gym in Kansas, and the result gets better and better with age. It’s as timeless as the jeans, leather jacket, and T-shirt that it cuts around in, growing into a fixture of rock ‘n’ roll while lesser records fade away as fads.
It’s not that it didn’t land first time around, but arriving in an era where music was very much recorded and divorced from the concept that its is a living beast not just bloody ‘bedroom pop’ created on a laptop and ‘saved’ in perpetuity, the sure-fire strength of it being an album that you envisage as a whole subculture unto itself was dismissed as a ‘vibe’ rather than a destination you can endless revisit and be adrenalised by in the coolest possible way.
It’s a classic too, curiously classy to have charted anywhere in the world upon release, but almost ten years later, it still stands near enough soberly at the end of the bar, and it’s time for you to say “Hi” and have your mind blown.
