Le Butcherettes
Cry Is For The Flies

2014 was also the year of the Suarez.

In particular, of the Suarezes who like meat.

If the Uruguayan Pistolero is back on the field striking with ruthless aim and biting ankles (but when needed also chests, thighs, and shoulders), the most controversial Mexican philosopher of recent times returns with a new album after three years, resuming - but with more malice, is that possible...? Oh yes, if it is - a conversation started, and only paused, with Sin! Sin! Sin!.

Well - three years have passed. And something has changed. It changes (first of all) that the thought current of Teri Suarez 'Gender Bender' has its ""academic"" recognition under the label of "Butcherismo". And to avoid misunderstandings, don't even try to talk about "special (form of) feminism" or things like that. Because Our Lady doesn't really like - being associated with those feminists who preach the usual old mantras about equal rights and gender equality and give us what we deserve, etc., etc. This one, if anything, talks about equality with a butcher's cleaver in hand, making philosophy and butchery two things (but did you ever think...?) that can go together. So: yes to women's power, but it should be power to be exercised with a sharp blade. The male has always treated the female as butcher's meat, but now it's the female who has the weapon by the handle.

So: you have to be very careful.

And then her first book came out, poetry that becomes a metaphor of life lived with the skill of a seasoned writer. Other times, it is poetry of carcasses, slaughters, and shattered organs that even Robert Rodriguez wouldn't capture if he put down the camera and picked up pen and paper.

And it happened that a year and more on a tour with another Rodriguez - Omàr - turned the ex(?)-"princesa del punk" of Guadalajara into a stage beast that would require a sedative and a muzzle to stop. The subject is armed (with a guitar, but only that...?) and dangerous.

Or you would have to tie her up, blindfold her, lock her in the trunk, and take her into the desert. Which is exactly what happens in the video for Demon Stuck In Your Eye, which looks like a clip from a B-movie shot in Texas.

How does Cry Is For The Flies present itself? Ugly and evil. Brutal, paranoid. Hard and edgy in sound, without respite. Anxiety-inducing. Obsessive to the extreme. You finish playing it with your head spinning more than the record, reduced to a balloon. There are no breaks, not a single soft track; it is tension and nervous exhaustion from the first to the last second. The only pause (but it only serves to break the listening into two parts) is a recorded monologue by Henry Rollins on the theme of guilt - there is another cameo on the record, that of Shirley Manson. And then the massacre resumes.

Less creative than its predecessor, yes. It loses in variety, but impresses in its ruthless nature, rock-solid, wrapped in a shroud of negativity that never dissipates. The lyrics are disconcerting: they mix splatter scenes and surrealism, translate nightmare spectacles into words, flirt with the gruesome, give shape to man-eating carnivorous chairs. At the butchery counter Teresa plunges her bloody hands into the innards of her own unconscious, and extracts - transfigured - images of teenage years spent in Denver with violence. Among the abuse and discrimination suffered by those coming from south of the Rio Grande.

Very vivid memories. We are, after all, talking about a girl from '89. But with an incredible visionary talent. I love her.

The intellectual temptations from her debut remain (even if in hindsight it would take a lot of courage to call them "ambitions"...), especially in Poet From Nowhere, the passion for Russian literature remains, the keyboards that sting like needles in your ears remain. And memories of that shapeless thing called "grunge" - simply psychotic hard-blues, turned over and violated with the bad manners of punk.

In times of "alt-rock" that often has the prerogative of being neither alternative nor rock, such malice seems inspired by that proverbial Sacred Fire we wait for like water in the desert...

...or like live blood from the veins?

In that case, Teresa's thirst is far from being quenched...