LA CHINGA + GUESTS // RAILWAY STAGE & BEER CAFÉ

“La chingaaaaa!” 

We’ll spare any sensitive unilingual anglophones the meaning; what matters is that Spackler’s dream of a hard rock power trio built on erogenous funkadelic rhythms and a devotion to life’s more sublime pleasures—chief among them: tequila—was now embodied inside a beautifully obscene two-word incantation.

Drummer/vocalist Jay Solyom and guitarist/vocalist Ben Yardley—also a noted professor of theremin—were conscripted shortly after, both veterans of Vancouver’s notoriously dead-end music scene, both beautifully obscene in their own right. La Chinga’s self-titled debut record was rushed out of a makeshift studio in 2013 on nothing but fumes and the liberating force of not giving a shit, landing like a hairball crossed with a stink bomb inside a world of yoga pant commerce, condo developments, and Macbook “musicians.”

This was a revolutionary act—or maybe a devolutionary one, at least.

Meanwhile Spackler was busying pouring all off his demented ‘70s obsessions into wild three-minute homemade music videos, finding the visual language of fuzz itself inside shitty horror films as he furnished the great infernal drive-in of his mind. Somehow, miraculously, this charming brew conspired to make La Chinga the hottest bunch of stoned ape groovers to hot wheel out of the Pacific Northwest since forever. 

Freewheelin’ followed in 2016 on Detroit’s Small Stone Records, and so did unhinged tours of Europe, more year-end accolades, festival slots (420 Fest, Sasquatch), and Spackler’s continuing evolution as the Orson Welles of retard-o-tronic found footage scuzz. And then things got serious: in late 2017, La Chinga entered Vancouver’s fabled Warehouse studio with no-less-fabled producer Jamey Koch (DOA, Copyright, Tragically Hip). The result? Beyond the Sky, available September 7. 

Opening track “Nothin’ That I Can’t Do” sets the agenda for the album’s 45-minutes of sublimely confident freedom rock, sometimes meaty and beaty (“Mama Boogie”, “Death Rider”), sometimes glam-handed (“Killer Wizard”), and occasionally even dirtbag pretty (“Keep on Rollin’). When it all melts into a puddle of phased goo in the final bars of “Warlords”, the listener has been rolled, boogied, and otherwise supernaturally conveyed well beyond the sky, maybe even beyond ridiculous. This is how it feels to get chinga’d, amigos. Surf’s up.