Loma Prieta
Life/Less

Seventeen minutes are nothing, or they could mean everything. Such a thought runs through your head while a vinyl spins incessantly and resonates in the living room with an earth-shattering vehemence. In its brevity along the spine of ten tracks, it gets inside you and creates chaos, the impenetrable kind, that overwhelms and leaves you stunned. This is because there is a lot of schizophrenia and sonic lacerations within this album, in “Life/Less” by Loma Prieta, a work released in 2010, in a context of rapid productivity.

From the first moment I listened to it, I associated the experience with two words: old school. Had it contained another handful of tracks, my mind would have taken me back to listening to those records like the "Dirty Rotten LP", from 1983, around twenty tracks in under 20 minutes, raw production without embellishments. Now, don't get me wrong, there is no trace of crossover thrash here; it's merely about associations due to the same impact on my ears. It’s also difficult to pinpoint what exactly Loma Prieta does, because despite the hermeticism of the compositions that has always characterized them, they manage to gather influences with dark shades, as if staring into a barrel of oil where the reflection is nonexistent, practically. Eyes become full of apathy, and the heart turns off. Fleeting shadows appear, but the thick and enveloping darkness that unsettles is dominant. The reverberation of noise, the DIY attitude of hardcore punk, the fragments of screamo melody, the bone-crushing riffs of a track like "Dark Mtn" meet dizzying slow-downs, the desperate sing-along that concludes "Apparition", furious accelerations and caustic impenetrability à la Converge and more. In short, Loma Prieta has its own sound where they embody their alarming anxieties. It is a dynamic madness, of sudden changes in a matter of seconds. Contrasting personalities emerge at the expense of others that crumble, like old bridges collapsing, leaving only rubble on the ground.

As you continue with “Life/Less”, the hope of hearing something that might finally provide a sigh of relief fades away. The agony might be mitigated by enlightening fragments, but Brian Kanagaki on guitar and Val Saucedo on drums quickly resume the torment before Sean Leary adds to it with his searing vocal cords, screaming with everything he has in his body: "I'm just trying to get to the bottom of plastic bottles. I want to know what It's like inside. Life at the bottom."

No sonic compromise, perhaps the best description of what is created in the thick fog descending on San Francisco, where they were born. It's a manifesto that knocks you down, violently clashing against anything in its path. And they don’t stop; they up the ante. They don't change in an existential void that corrodes and contaminates their sound, social fractures that shape Loma Prieta and return to us a creature that for years has been dismantling the limits of its musical scene, continually confirming itself as one of the most solid realities out there.