2021 is the year Lima, Peru’s last Rock Subterráneo band turns 20 years old. Morbo has been around enough to fuck up freely and then to nail it. No worries and no hurry. Who even cares what people is into these days? They don’t.To celebrate their anniversary we have the honor to release their latest work “¿A quién le echamos la culpa?”.This four track recording was slow cooked and happened when it needed to. The best one yet. Maybe they will make a better one in the future but this is it: They just mastered their own brand of punk and you can clearly listen to the band’s maturity between the lines of topics like getting drunk and not wanting to go to work. They also talk about things like messianic politics and people pointing fingers to the few bad apples ignoring their own part in the sea of shit. As a cherry on the top they pay homage to their rocknroll ancestors Los Yorks and Zcuela Crrada. One can say Morbo is a synthesis of both eras of Peruvian music plus they add their own thing.“¿A quién le echamos la culpa?” is really fun and also is about deep shit. That’s punk, right?Cover art by the one and only Abraham Díaz.Only 500 copies on black vinyl. Offset covers on recycled paper. Xeroxed booklet and complimentary lo-fi screen printed poster.Our take: Let’s get this out of the way up front: this record RULES. Not just “year end list” rules, but like “sound of the summer” rules. These records come around every once in a while—the Exploding Hearts LP; the No Hope for the Kids LP; Inepsy’s first two LPs; Criminal Damage’s first two albums—and the entire scene seems to latch onto them at once. ¿A Quién Le Echamos La Culpa? isn’t one of those records yet because it just came out, but it deserves to be. Peru’s Morbo has been a band for 20 years (!!!) and we’ve carried several of their records. I might have missed ¿A Quién Le Echamos La Culpa?, but Paco at La Vida Es Un Mus tipped me off that it was a special record, and boy was he right. ¿A Quién Le Echamos La Culpa? draws from a lot of different things—first and second-wave punk from all over the world, 60s garage rock (particularly Peru’s Los Saicos), and raw South American hardcore—and melds them into something I’ve never heard put together in this way. Some tracks are melodic punk songs with a lot of Sex Pistols in their DNA, while there are also garage rock rave-ups that wouldn’t be out of place on a Billy Childish album and tougher-sounding tracks that remind me of UK Subs-influenced bands like Toxic Reasons. Despite the variations in style, every song overflows with great riffs and catchy melodies. The recording is perfect too, with a lot of grit but not sounding self-consciously retro like some kind of audio version of an Instagram filter. Every track is a hit, but no two tracks are alike. It’s just a fucking great punk album and if you like punk you should get it.
