The Vacancy – Heart Attack

Swing Ding Amigos – The Mongolita Chronicles / 2004 Rock N Roll Purgatory / 21 Tracks / [email protected] / http://www.rocknrollpurgatory.com / Reviewed 27 January 2005

Mixing up the rock sounds of Corrosion of Conformity and Fu Manchu with some of the earlier rock of the seventies (think UFO and Kansas), Swing Ding Amigos are a weird creature, to say the least. The double-vocals of a track like “Nyquil” are so off-key and spoken instead of sung, which essentially means that through some weird combination, they are actually catchy. Using different filters (the echo chamber of “Hey Genie”) provides for a myriad of different emotions on the disc. “Hey Genie” is more psychedelic, while the straight-forward “0-2-60” will whip listeners into a mosh pitting frenzy. “Tik-tok” uses some of the same figures of song that made “Shout”, from Animal House such a memorable hit – different scaling up and down in tempos and the like. Jumping pretty much on a track by track basis between punk and experimental music, the Swing Ding Amigos try to pander to two very distinct groups of individuals with “The Mongolita Chronicles”. The material will turn practically everyone off from the CD excepting the most experimental and hardcore fans. This is sad, as the Amigos are beyond impressive in their instrumentation and arrangements on their decidedly non-traditional songs.

Most exciting for me on “The Mongolita Chronicles” is the bi-lingual “Mochate Momia”, which jumps back and forth from Spanish to English, only the second track on the disc to do so (besides Tik-Tok). So many bands shuck any heritage or culture they may have for the language of the most affluent market – which often means Americanized English with a “proper” accent, destroying any flair the band may have had in their native tongue. The Amigos are too spastic to stay for more than a minute in any one given genre or song – the 21 tracks seem almost as if they are played by a number of bands instead of the Amigos.

The Amigos are the perfect example of a band that means everything to everyone (yes, like the Everclear song) and yet does not dilute their sound for greater success. Equally proficient in everything they do, the energy of the Amigos will win more people as fans than any track that they could commit to disc. There is nary a moment to breathe during “The Mongolita Chronicles”, and the average listener will be as exhausted after this disc as the Amigos have to be after finishing up their thirty-minute orgasm on stage.

Top Tracks: Mochata Momia, Beautiful Things

Rating: 6.3/10