Revisiting Ekkaia’s “Demasiado Tarde Para Pedir Perdón
Demasiado Tarde Para Pedir Perdón by Ekkaia turns twenty years old this April 1st. Being a younger person, it feels weird appreciating an album that’s six days younger than me so much, especially as it has so much influence on my own songwriting. You’d think an album that lay the groundwork for the sub-sub genre of Neocrust would have been overshadowed by newer, better albums as I discovered the genre, but this album is one I return to again and again.
Neocrust goes by so many other different names: Melodic Crust, Emoviolence, Emocrust; Neocrust is probably the most used term to describe it though. It’s crust punk, which is a heavy subgenre of hardcore, with a lot more metal influence. The vocals tend to be screams or growls, the guitars are low-tuned, and the drums fast. Crust punk was pioneered by bands like Discharge (the d-beat, a commonly used beat, stands for “Discharge-beat”). Neocrust tends to add more melody to the genre, influences from black metal, and more poetic lyrics, usually concerning similar topics to Crust Punk, which, like most punk, is about politics, anarchism, fighting injustice, and mental health.
The title of means “Too Late to Apologize” in Spanish, as the band hails from Spain, which has a good Neocrust scene. I discovered this album while working a small warehouse job where I assembled things (which I quit after a month) and was allowed to listen to music throughout the long day. After discovering the legendary Neocrust band Fall of Efrafa, a band that released three linked concept LPs following a similar story to the novel “Watership Down”, I fell in love with the sound of Neocrust. Once home, I did some research and Ekkaia was mentioned as one of the progenitors of the genre.
Opening with clean guitar arpeggios in “Mientras Dorminos”, after 30 seconds the band turns into a rawer distorted sound. Over the chaos of the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar, a melody lets itself be known through a simple but effective repetition of the same three chords. The raspy screams of the vocals stick out over the instruments, and due to my limited knowledge of Spanish on top of the lack of enunciation, I tend to not be able to understand them.
The clean guitar comes up briefly a few more times, most notably in “Caminando en Circulos”, but otherwise, the rest of the album is distorted. The production is rawer than some other notable Neocrust, but that adds to the melancholic sound the album has. The whole album feels like it’s mourning. While there are outbursts of anger with faster songs, even then, there’s a tinge of sadness to all of them. The vocals also add to this feel, as they sound like someone scream-crying. The album cover, that of an industrial waste with a red background, works to put this otherwise ethereal way of thinking about music into words.
My favorite song on the album lies solidly in the middle of the 9-track album as track 6: “El Último Aliento”. It starts out slower, with the rhythm guitar’s chord progression continuously going into a very low register which scratches my brain very nicely, especially when coupled with the melody. It builds up speed until all instruments stop and just the vocals remain for a few seconds and then goes into a thrashy part that is one of those outbursts of anger. It seamlessly transitions back into a slower verse, and then again into the fast part to close out the song. It’s an angry melancholia, something that I feel embodies some emotions that have embedded themselves deep in myself.
This album was Ekkaia’s second to last release, with a 3-track EP coming out 6 months later in October of 2004. Other than compilations, they haven’t released anything since. This album has been rereleased a few times physically, most recently by Alerta Antifascista Records. It is only available through Bandcamp, with nothing on streaming. Although overshadowed by the British neocrust scene, I still find that this album really holds up, and hope more people will appreciate it.