Canal Irreal (Unreal Channel in English) is a hardcore punk band from the South Side of Chicago. The Second City’s South Side has a very diverse punk scene owing to the predominantly and historically working-class character, but usually the phrase “South-Side Hardcore” is employed as a catch-all for two specific sub-sets, skin heads and Latin punks, often of Mexican heritage, but not always (see, La Armada). Canal Irreal falls definitively into the second camp.
Canal Irreal lined up a shot across the brow of the Chicago punk scene back in the summer of 2019 with their first single “Si Somos.” That single was like a laser sight hovering around the temple, a threat their self-titled debut finally makes good on. The devastatingly serrated guitar work cuts like a butcher’s knife through soft leather, following grooves that screech, slip, frantically pivot at abrupt intervals, like a man with a bullet wound in his side desperately seeking shelter from the rain and his pursuers in a strip of haunted row houses. The percussion braces you for the forceful staccato twack of the vocals, and the way they work together almost sounds like you’re witnessing an aural boxing match between two partially corporeal, and wholly malevolent entities.
Opener “Manarchist” begins with a trouble-seeking post-punk riff that sounds like it’s being played by the Devil himself, which slowly takes on more of a noirish tone in contrast to the quickening tempos and increasingly caustic quality of the vocal work’s slimy strike. “Tombas” is like something that would flow from the car stereo of a possessed GTO as it rips down the streets of quiet, depopulated and deindustrialized urban neighborhoods. “Knockdown” sounds like it just got back from the border and was followed by something nasty and viciously inhuman. “Glaze” slows things down, but only to make the pain it expresses last longer, as it sadistically lowers you into a vat of dissonate, acidic chords. “Pestes” has a slight, but recognizable Spanish guitar melody, that survives despite the hostile musical architecture that proceeds to implode around it and the listener. “Not Tomorrow” is a poison-tipped knife fight in the green room of a club that is quickly being swallowed by a gluttonous sinkhole. The band’s first single “Si Somos” reappears here with a new mix, keeping the tubular and mystical qualities of the previous version, but now heightened to become all the more convincing as a summoning spell for something unspeakable. “Emergencia” is a short burst of Die Kreuzen-esque hardcore that sets up the anguished, red-eyed and bewildering collapse of the closer “Que Paso?”
The music on Canal Irreal stands up on its own as a worthy addition to Chicago’s punk canon, but it’s incumbent on me to mention the linage within the Chicago underground that this band draws from. Their lead singer Martin Sorrondeguy was also the vocalist and key player in both Los Crudos and the seminal queercore band Limp Wrist. In addition, the rest of Canal Irreal’s roster overlaps pretty completely with the folks behind the thrashy and wild hardcore group Sin Orden, who we last heard from on their 2009 release, Arte, Cultura y Restistencia. So if you didn’t know, now you know. And now you are out of excuses for not checking out this LP.
You can buy or stream Canal Irreal’s self-titled LP below via Bandcamp:
Beach Impediment Records did two vinyl pressings of this album back in June and they both sold out immediately. If you want this puppy on vinyl you should probably write to them and demand a third run (or search for it on Discogs).
