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Myanmar Punks Form FIERY New Hardcore Punk Band CACEROLAZO – Drop Sick Full Length!!!

By on November 16, 2024

When punk emerges from within and in direct response to authoritarianism, it is at its most raw and powerful. Hardcore punk collective CACEROLAZO are demonstrating this on their furious new album The Sound of Anger and Dissent, recorded amid military rule and civil war in Myanmar.

Myanmar’s military seized power from the democratically elected government on 1 February 2021. The protest movement demanding the army return to its barracks was quickly crushed, with conflict spreading across the country as the resistance took arms to defend itself and fight back against the regime’s violence and destruction. Nearly 3,000 civilians have been killed and over 13,000 people remain detained.

A collection of Myanmar punks and members of international bands formed Cacerolazo in the country’s biggest city Yangon shortly after the coup, quickly releasing “The Night Will Not Be Silenced”, an ode to the daily 8pm banging of pots and pans in a demonstration of disgust towards military rule that included a cover of 1988 Myanmar revolutionary anthem Kabar Ma Kyay Bu.

The band took its name from the Spanish word for this form of protest popularised in 1971 when women banged empty pots on the streets to demonstrate against food shortages in Chile. The practice also has a long history in Myanmar as a means of driving out evil spirits.

After following “The Night Will Not Be Silenced” up with a hardcore punk rendition of Italian anti-facist anthem “Bella Ciao” with famed Myanmar punks The Rebel Riot, Cacerolazo are now releasing a nine-track record of raging hardcore punk recorded between March 2021 and July 2022. Singing in Burmese and English, each track is a pulsating encapsulation of the fury the masses of Myanmar feel towards their oppressors.

“Disobey” implores the sympathetic among the regime’s police and military to defect to the resistance. “The Shit You’re Selling” lambasts the inane attempts of the junta’s media mouthpieces to spin their own narrative about the conflict. “Shatter the World” is a rallying cry to the brave protestors who fled city life to take up arms against the military from the hills in Myanmar’s borderlands.

Cacerolazo takes influence from the snappy hardcore punk of Minor Threat and Gorilla Biscuits on tracks like Weaponise and Sick to the Back Teeth, while showing their love for Melvins and Cancer Bats when they slow things down on The Shit You’re Selling and The Sea is Rising.

With the non-Myanmar members of Cacerolazo forced to leave the country, the band only had one clandestine opportunity to perform together to an audience in late 2021 – a blistering ten-minute set thrashed out a few dozen people in a sweaty practice space in Yangon. It was the first punk show in Myanmar under the new military regime and a brave act of resistance at a time when a Facebook comment can get you arrested, let alone playing revolutionary music.

https://www.instagram.com/cacerolazo.myanmar

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