En El Garaje

Description

D?cima V?ctima were a Spanish band that, during their short-lived career between 1981 and 1984, developed a very personal sound reminiscent of Joy Division, The Cure and other British post-punk bands. Although commercial success evaded them, rarely has any Spanish band achieved such a high degree of quality and coherence in their music and personality. This LP contains previously unreleased tracks recorded by D?cima V?ctima in November 1983, one month before their last concert. Seven of these songs feature different lyrics to the ones later recorded for the "Un hombre solo" album. This is the way they performed them that night on the Rock-Ola stage, so this record can be considered, to some extent, an approximation to their last show and to their powerful live sound. After many years, we've recovered a rehearsal session that we had recorded on an old cassette tape. It had originally been laid down on a four-track recorder but unfortunately the tape got lost. The story of these tracks goes back to the last weekend of October 1983, when we went to record at Paco Trinidad's family home in the mountains north of Madrid. It was unexpectedly cold that weekend and we weren't prepared for the drop in temperatures. We drove there surrounded by mist and before returning had to scrape the ice off the windscreen as best we could. Paco recorded our latest songs on a four-track tape recorder at the house. It was done live, except for extra takes of Lars playing the clarinet and some guitar details. The garage sound, as the name suggests, was achieved in the garage and an adjoining room where Jos? Brena played the drums. I used to write most of the lyrics. It always took me a long time and with the chaos working outside Madrid for several months caused, I had only finished the lyrics to 'Un hombre solo' and 'Bajo un cielo abierto'. I used to hum the rest of the tracks during rehearsals, which was partially concealed by the echo effect over the vocals. Fortunately, Lars brought along the lyrics that were missing for that recording. On this tape the track 'Una vez m?s' is instrumental and it's been so long now that we don't remember if it was like that at the time or if we hadn't defined the vocal melody yet. I rewrote most of the lyrics for the studio edition of the tracks on "Un hombre solo", with the exception of Lars's version of 'La frontera perdida'. It's not that his lyrics weren't good but I was more comfortable singing the words I wrote, as they felt more intimate. This was never an issue for the band, as we believed that vocals and lyrics were united and each of us had the freedom to develop their own part of the track. This applied at an economic level too, because we always registered the songs as group compositions, drawing no distinctions between lyrics and music. The sleeve design is by Lars, who designed all the covers to our records. It's a photo montage of our performance for the Maqueta de Oro (Gold Demo) at the Diario Pop awards in March 1983,