Jan 11, 2008
tell your friends…
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound Engineering by Patrick Stolley
It's
easy to imagine what Dios Malos are doing right now. They're doing
nothing. They're sleeping and they probably will be for the next few
hours - deep into the afternoon. They're hibernators, these big bears.
They are likely ragged from a long night of DIY recording, weed
consumption and sound experiments that could make anybody require a bed
and a half a day of recuperation, so the process of creation can start
again the next day when the time seems fit, after the dinner mint and
following the downing of the third beer.
Right now, it's
noontime in Hawthorne, Calif., where the boys live, and it's not a good
time. Waking now would have them working on severe sleep deprivation
and you can't make up for that time lost. For a band that has drifted
so unexpectedly onto the map and away from it over its short life, this
laidback approach is actually a reminder that persistency and artifact
are the best reflections of each other during their mating seasons -
when pushing never becomes shoving and there's a leisure excavation to
the process of pulling the music from the inside caves and caverns.
They
observe the calls of the nightingales, though the sounds may just be
the sandy sea shells gossiping as they're licked by the soft black
waves of the Pacific, and they operate on a standard time that sees
sunsets as the only sunrises they know. The band is a living
documentation of the full, no bond captivity that the obsessive work of
countless pop songwriters that came before them can have on people when
they just give over to it. They've allowed themselves to get buried in
a world that can be maddening and fascinating in the same beat, a world
that offers inspiration, but in stifling measures in that the stuff
that makes you feel like you just got your bell rung is the stuff that
an aspirant may never reach. It won't stop the search or the climbing
of the walls though, that possibility of impossibility.
Dios
Malos hold themselves up against no other band, but those writers and
composers that they have reverence for are not well hidden. They love
60s pop in big gulping doses - The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The
Zombies, The Turtles, all of the sharp-suited young men who defined the
song about the girl first for radio. The path well-trod is completely
visible from where the band started in the late 90s and yet, their
divergent wonderment in the same veins that spruced has been what's
made them still one of the most interesting bands to have seen progress
and one of the reasons that the counter culture gospel Fader magazine
considers them such an original and boundary-pushing outfit. It's hard
to argue.
Still working on its third record, a process that's
taken up well over two years as it's been label-less and manager-less,
forging a different way while still being hand-picked to open shows for
TV on the Radio, the band led by lead singer Joel Morales, has made it
its life's work to stretch itself and its techniques in the pure pop
structure as far as it can go without going crazy, though there could
be some of that in there as well.
What's finished with the
third album, a sampler version of which they handed us with a Xeroxed
photo of Magic Johnson on the cover in March and a nearly complete
version with the same cover was forked over when they were last by in
August, is another sprawling bit of personal posture, caked with
references to all of the convergent interruptions that stride into the
dollhouse, or in this case, the fantasy world that they pledge to and
that makes it alright for them to play with a constant, gleeful daze.
The schizophrenic, loopy and all-powerful world that Dios Malos makes
its home in is one for the diehards, for the bachelors for life, for
those who don't have room for any new friends for the mistress - the
all encompassing one - is the perfect song and it's a lady that can
only be touched by the dedicated.
first song
- unreleasedWings cover A cover of Paul McCartney's universal life anthem.
second song
- unreleasedOriginally from a UK single. A Dios golden oldie.
third song
- original version appears on DiosFrom the first album, Dios.
- fourth song
- unreleasedFrom the upcoming 3rd album.