With members culled from the beleaguered, lumpen masses that inhabit the waste trenches, ashen steppes and glutinous landfills that constitute the remaining landmass of the Australian colonial project, Lái 来 is a d-beat band whose members are hardly strangers to the form, having played in the high-culture, civil-collapse Pisschrïst, as well as Extinct Exist, UBIK, and Masses.
While Lái play a fairly recognizable and politically minded variety of crust punk, one of the things that helps the group stand out from its peers in the English-speaking world is the tendency of vocalist Alda often to flip between singing in Bahasa Indonesian and English. She is able to maneuver between these two very different linguistic modes without losing any of the momentum of her toothy bark, which has the effect of leaving you without any avenues for escape from the band’s scything attack.
In terms of the guitar and drum work, Totalitär provides an excellent vantage point for what the band is doing with its snaking riffs, and its grab-and-maul grooves. Most tracks feel like an alligator has clamped down on your torso and commenced with shaking its head and performing barrel rolling, with your body helplessly held in the vice of its jaws, alternating between being fully submerged in a soup of algae and fish guts and being ground against rocks and large pieces of rotten wood to help separate your muscles and the segments of your spine
I would also suggest that there are some striking similarities between Bay area’s Tørsö and Permanent Ruin and Lái, not especially because of the forward presence of women’s voices in all three bands, but simply due to the relentless idiom of feral, bloody-gummed aggression all three have managed to tap into and draw forth from the human soul.
You can stream the entirety of debut LP Pontianak below via Bandcamp:
Get a copy of Pontianak on vinyl from Ruin Nation Records here.
