THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “La Chinga are a hard rock power trio with psychedelic powers sitting on the world’s edge in Vancouver. Drawing from Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The MC5, and their own superbad habits, they have established a beachhead with two albums on Detroit’s cult label Small Stone Records and a penetrating buzz across Canada.
The band were conceived in 2011 when bassist/vocalist Carl Spackler was surfing in SoCal and his Chicano beach buddies kept hailing each other with the mysterious phrase: “La chingaaaaa!”. Drummer/vocalist Jay Solyom and guitarist/vocalist Ben Yardley — also a noted professor of theremin — were conscripted shortly after. They were both veterans of Vancouver’s notoriously dead-end music scene, and 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 busy pouring all of 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, 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, 45 minutes of sublimely confident freedom rock, sometimes meaty and beaty, sometimes glam-handed, and occasionally even dirtbag pretty, where the listener gets rolled, boogied, and otherwise supernaturally conveyed well beyond the sky, maybe even beyond ridiculous. This is how it feels to get chinga’d, amigos. Now the fiery trio are back with their fourth album Primal Forces.
It was written and recorded during the tumultuous times of riots, lockdowns and pandemic: A perfect ground for dystopian vibes to permeate the lyrics and album storyline. “The themes of love, sex, death, and hell in a handbasket, so why not go for it and go out with a bang are what drive this album to new territory for us,” say the band. The rock ‘n’ roll is heavy, the riffs are flying and so are La Chinga. Madness, frustration, joy, terror and ecstasy all mingle in a rip-roaring fusion of electric hooks, hip-swaying grooves and choruses to be sung along til the world collapses!”
