BAND OF THE DAY: MIGRA VIOLENTA

Context is everything. Lee Barrett for example, while being an enormous fan of widdly technical nonsense and corset-clad lady metal, is a voice to be trusted when it comes to fast, bollock-bashing hardcore (he's probably to be trusted when it comes to that other stuff too, but how on earth would I know?) - he's of the generation where this stuff was taking off, where words didn't exist to describe what made Heresy and Extreme Noise Terror different and exciting. So I know that if he offers up a band, it's not because he's read about it in some irrelevant, dollar-chasing magazine or it's ticking some demographic box, it's because it somehow bottles that frantic, all-or-nothing chaos that blew his mind umpteen years ago, and he thinks I'll dig it too. He's a wise man, and he's right in this case. Migra Violenta are utterly savage.

Playing the sort of breakneck, thrashing hardcore than Latin tongues seem expertly suited to - Ratos de Porão, Los Crudos and Cripple Bastards being good examples of this venomous delivery at its best - Migra Violenta formed in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires in 1999, though their members are drawn from Colombia and Brazil, and created a whole mini-scene around themselves with a zine, a label, a distro and the like. Contemptious of Yanqui posturing in the vast majority of South American hardcore bands, Migra Violenta confront regional issues - government, war, capitalism and corruption - head on across a number of splits and releases, the most accessible of which being 2004's 'Holocausto Capitalista', an unrelenting assault of tense riffs, urgent, anxious vocals and the occasional heart-tugging Tragedy melodies that seem to emerge from the smoke like a lost child in the aftermath of a riot.