Review: Ordre Etern - Revolució Soterrada

It’s not necessarily strength that drives Revolució Soterrada, but strain: the act of pushing back against the walls that close in, and screaming as counter-active forces endeavour to strangle the throat shut. The music is never permitted to rise fully to its feet, yet it never ceases to try. The rhythms arrive in stifled bursts of catharsis and stumbles of syncopation, trapped within cycles of restriction and booming breakthrough, while the synths spit phrases growled through clenched teeth, like the downward pressure of civil obedience suffocating all sentiments of revolutionary dissent. Most crucially, the voices are weary; they’ve been screaming the same phrases for hours prior to my arrival, now reduced to slurred consonants and gnarled gasps of breathlessness, persisting through resilience of mind even as the body starts to fall under the inevitable weight of fatigue.

There is noise everywhere – pressurized spews of static, mangled metallic percussion, manipulated shards of guitar – yet it feels choked off. It comes in bursts, it promptly stops. Pockets of silence hang where the anger should be, as Ordre Etern fight for the oxygen necessary to continue. On “Metropolis”, a dirty whirr lurches around in a circle, like a machine forced to operate through the onset of rust and erosion. Drums shunt the process forward in metronomic thumps. On “Defensa”, the stereo image bends and contracts through a nauseating whirr. In both cases, the voice of Victor Hurtado comes wrapped in a psychedelic slapback echo, perhaps resembling the deep, almost spiritual desire to transcend the grime and industrial disrepair. Despite the omnipresence of waste and immobilising noise, Revolució Soterrada still glimmers with the potential for change.