Sangre young men

>> Purveyors of lo pesado Mi Santa Sangre find their own space

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“You haven’t answered my question. Were you scared of us?” Fernando Pinzon, guitarist for Mi Santa Sangre, is grilling Czech/Breton drummer-come-lately Steve Cerny about his initial reaction to the local, largely Latino heaviosity band he had somehow found himself pounding the skins for.
Not that the babyfaced, clean-cut Pinzon, Panamanian by birth, is a particularly frightening figure. Neither is Mexican-born bassist/howler Mariano Franco. But Cerny might have been justifiably a bit nervous about being the whitest shade of pale in the bunch. With only limited Spanish and a dearth of salsa dance moves under his belt, he might have been in over his head.

Any such trepidation proved unfounded. Mi Santa Sangre, despite being one of too many Latino bands that have copped the Jodorowsky film title for a moniker, is hardly your garden-variety rock en español cover band. Multilingual, heavy with a groove but hardly rapmetal, MSS are misfits in both the rock and español categories. Moreover, rapper/cheerleader/spokesmodel Cliff Caporale, being Spanish-Italian-Canadian, had already kinda thrown the gringo curve.
“I’m still in the dark,” says Cerny, “trying to figure out who these guys are and how to react to them, because I’m not used to it. I come from a much more restrained, introverted, rational background. But they’re actually the first band I’ve really enjoyed, 100 per cent, playing with.” So no, he’s not scared, Fernando.

Mexico a gogo

Cerny had been with the band a mere four months when he got his real baptism of fire vis-à-vis la raza. Last August, Mi Santa Sangre joined fellow quasi-Latino locals Overbass on what was called the Mexi-Cana 2001 tour, gigging around Mexico City with Riesgo de Contagio, Bazooko and Saoco (the last two had the favour returned when they played up here in October).

“I found people in Mexico, from what I observed,” says Cerny, “resembled Northern Africans more than the Spanish—especially because of the conditions. Spain is European, you can sense that there. Whereas Mexico, while it has a Spanish influence, is definitely different. I had some culture shock, initially, mostly because everyone around me spoke Spanish. I felt a bit lost. I enjoyed what I experienced there, even if it was a bit disorienting. It was also the first time I’d been out of town to play a show.”

The experience let Cerny see our own scene in a new light. “In the Rant LineTM, there are always rants about how shitty the local music scene is. In some ways, I’d diss it too. When we went to Mexico, we were unknown there. When we played shows, though, people seemed a lot more appreciative of the fact that they had bands to see. Also, they mix everything up—punk, ska, hardcore, reggae, even traditional stuff.”

While their Latino backgrounds place MSS at one step removed in the Montreal scene, they found the zapato on the other foot. “People spoke to me in English,” recalls Pinzon, “because they thought I was a pocho—a Mexican-American. They perceived the band as coming from the north, which is pretty much all the same ball, in their heads. It wasn’t annoying, though. They were really cool, we could talk to them about anything.”

The Mexicans could be excused for misconstruing the band, if they’d overheard them in conversation or even considered their lyrics. “A friend recommended to me once,” says Caporale, “that we shouldn’t do two languages in one song—it’s not marketable. I said, I speak three languages in one sentence, with my friend. Why should I worry about it?”

This comes through on their overdue, eponymous debut CD, launched this week despite being a tad outdated, both in line-up and in musical direction. Since the recording, Cerny has come in and the band has become far more experimental—“When we can actually define a song—oh, that’s metal, or whatever—that’s when we don’t play that song anymore,” says Caporale.

Likewise, the lyrics. While Franco, who heads that department, still takes digs at pigs, pols and the Pope, he takes less obvious paths of late. “It’s still about revolution, but personal revolution. We still have our strong beliefs and ideologies—it’s our faith, I guess. People had religion before, which gave them a way of living and some kind of hope, even if it wasn’t true. Now, we still have to have some kind of faith. I could be political or whatever, but it needs to be there. At the same time, I think we’ve realized that we have to be humble and accept that we’re not going to change everything. We have to change ourselves, too. We became introspective, which I think is part of our experimentation. We’ve gone into the unconscious and all this stuff. Not spirituality, but the unconscious, that energy.” :

CD launch with guests Anick and Half-Baked at Jupiter Room on Friday, Feb. 8, 9pm, $5