As a crush of enthusiastic dudes knocked into me in spastic reverie while watching Made in Mexico at a house show last week, I recalled how, mere hours before, the room had been empty save for a heap of cases and equipment and an inexplicable grocery cart filled to the brim with VHS cassettes of Korean porn. Prior to that, I had walked down a quiet residential street, approached the address I’d been given, found a handwritten note pinned to the door of the house (“Go around back for the show”), and followed its instructions, only to discover I was going to be That Guy: the dude who shows up for a party at the exact time the flyer says to show up. D’oh.
It was worth that minor agony for the ecstasy that was Made in Mexico’s strange, intense aggregate of Latin grooves and noise rock. (This is, after all, a Providence band with former members of Arab on Radar and La Machine.) The bulk of the set was material from their new Guerillaton (Skin Graft), where they’ve turned down the AmRep knob and cranked up the Third World percussion. In this pumped and packed Allston basement, that meant mayhem.
Dead Kennedys punk battled with exuberant salsa madness, especially during the crazy extended drum breaks of “Gran Colombia.” Guitarist Jeff Schneider — in a bandana and playing a guitar shaped like an AK-47, complete with a bandolero strap — spewed out crinkly and brittle shards while vocalist Rebecca Mitchell (half Elvira goth chick and half Yma Sumac) flipped casually and continually from seductive and emotive to demonic and aggressive. She climaxed with a new song, “Yes We Can,” the band pausing for her to loose a torrent of wordless trills and ratchet the insanity up until, I shit you not, a kid to my right smashed a beer can on his forehead in revved-up glee. ¡Ay caramba!
