La Chinga was born in Vancouver, BC in 2012, although in reality it was conceived about a year earlier when bassist/vocalist Carl Spackler was surfing in SoCal and his Chicano beach buddies kept hailing each other with the mysterious phrase: “La chingaaaaa!”
Drummer/vocalist Jay Solyom and guitarist/vocalist Ben Yardley — also a noted professor of theremin — were conscripted shortly after, both veterans of Vancouver’s notoriously dead-end music scene, both beautifully obscene in their own right. La Chinga’s self-titled debut record was rushed out of a makeshift studio in 2013 on nothing but fumes and the liberating force of not giving a shit, landing like a hairball crossed with a stink bomb inside a world of yoga pant commerce, condo developments, and Macbook “musicians.” This was a revolutionary act, or maybe a devolutionary one, at least.
Meanwhile, Spackler was busy pouring all of his demented ‘70s obsessions into wild three-minute homemade music videos, finding the visual language of fuzz itself inside shitty horror films as he furnished the great infernal drive-in of his mind. Somehow, miraculously, this charming brew conspired to make La Chinga the hottest bunch of stoned ape groovers to hot wheel out of the Pacific Northwest since forever.
“Freewheelin’” followed in 2016 on Detroit’s Small Stone Records, and so did unhinged tours of Europe, more year-end accolades, festival slots (420 Fest, Sasquatch), and Spackler’s continuing evolution as the Orson Welles of retard-o-tronic found footage scuzz. And then things got serious: in late 2017, La Chinga entered Vancouver’s fabled Warehouse studio with no-less-fabled producer Jamey Koch (DOA, Copyright, Tragically Hip). The result? “Beyond the Sky”, 45 minutes of sublimely confident freedom rock, sometimes meaty and beaty, sometimes glam-handed, and occasionally even dirtbag pretty, where the listener gets rolled, boogied, and otherwise supernaturally conveyed well beyond the sky, maybe even beyond ridiculous. This is how it feels to get chinga’d, amigos. Now the fiery trio is gearing up to release their new offering “Primal Forces”, to be unleashed in the fall of 2023 via Ripple Music.
LA CHINGA is
Carl Spackler – Vocals & Bass
Ben Yardley – Guitars, Vocals & Moog Synth
Jay Solyom – Drums Percussion & Bg vocals
LA CHINGA links
Facebook⎪Bandcamp⎪Instagram⎪Spotify
RIPPLE MUSIC links
