Since emerging fully-formed at the end of 2012 Una Bestia Incontrolable have opened up a place for themselves among the very best hardcore-punk bands in the world. International hardcore is in rude health at the moment but while some indulge in enjoyable well-crafted genre exercises, a crushing mosh-part here, a studied d-beat there, UBI have developed a sound that’s compelling and punk, but clearly apart from the autophagic morass that is often punk in the internet age.
Much of Metamorfosi finds itself as a series of shifting hypnotic pulses rolling into each other. Bass and drums chug onwards, a swirling erratic heartbeat, an oncoming force, a nagging buzz and rumble tickling your hindbrain just on the murky borders of conscious thought, as the guitar scritches and scratches with grubby panic, insistent catchy riffs needling and dragged out like stuckthought phrases, daggersharp licks shimmying forth in the sinister thrum.
The record reverberates with a sense of seething distress, mind and body teetering on the edge of a cataclysmic drop, Abric De Plom (Lead Coat) is a recurring nightmare, swallowing you up and unavoidable, the No Us Ho Esperaveu (You Weren’t Expecting It) finds a militaristic drive as it echoes with the cold dislocation that is the dull pain-throb baseline of millenial life, Nosaltres Som La Carn (We Are the Flesh) thunders with physical discomfort, collapsing in on itself, Tot Sol is a freeing mechanistic 1-2 rush, the title track a stuttering scream of transformation.
Metamorfosi swings and lives with the threat of something constantly approaching, a change, an ending, some long-threatened eschaton finally invoked, something out there, a beast maybe, of some kind, uncontrollable and almost here. (Joe Briggs)
