Album Review: Viaje a 800, Coñac Oxigenado: Deluxe Edition
I readily count Viaje a 800 among the most criminally undervalued heavy rock bands Europe has ever produced, so maybe if you’re looking for an impartial assessment of Spinda Records‘ do-it-up-right Coñac Oxigenado: Deluxe Edition reissue of their 2012 swansong (review here), I’m not the one to provide it. They were never super-prompt on output, but between 2001’s Diablo Roto Dë… and 2007’s Estampida de Trombones, the band that in 2010 would record as the trio lineup of bassist/vocalist/keyboardist Poti, guitarist/backing vocalist J. Angel and drummer Andres, fostered a style of heavy rock that was utterly their own and represented not only influences from the Californian desert, but from classic progressive rock as well as Andalusian folk melodies, flamenco rhythms and percussion, and a resulting atmosphere that was ahead of its time.
As the culmination of Viaje a 800’s original run, Coñac Oxigenado pushed their craft as far as it would ever go (to-date; never say never) into those proggy leanings, and from its 12-minute opener “Oculi Omnium In Te Sperant Domine” through the in-English cover of “What’s Going On” originally by Australian heavy-’70s rockers Buffalo, the fluidity, depth and presence they were able to establish in this material still feels innovative 12 years after the fact. And it may well be that having such an individual sound is part of the reason they’ve been so undervalued – I’m sure out there somewhere is a German band who’ve got handclaps in a song like those in the purpose-declaring, scorcher-solo-inclusive jammy middle of Coñac Oxigenado’s lead track, but I wouldn’t expect it to work as well – but even from an outsider’s perspective, it’s easy enough to read an element of cultural discrimination in how isolated the Iberian heavy underground for the most part is even today, beyond whatever language barrier may or may not apply to a given act as it might here.
Thus Coñac Oxigenado: Deluxe Edition — which arrives coinciding with a return to the stage for limited live shows this year — feels something like an 88-minute love letter to Viaje a 800, whose original 1998 demo, Santa Agueda, also saw release through Spinda in 2019, and its 3LP presentation captures an archivalist impulse, preserving a complicated narrative of the recording and of the band more generally. In addition to the five-song/51-minute original tracklisting, the ‘deluxe’-ness manifests in four additional cuts, three of which are alternate versions — “Oculi Omnium In Te Sperant Domine,” “Tagarnina Blues” and “Eterna Soledad” — and the last of which is the previously-unreleased “Todo es Nada.” To my understanding, none of these recordings have surfaced before (the difference being that a re-recorded “Todo es Nada” didn’t make the final 2012 LP), and that lineup changes were part of it — anybody looking for a probably-wrong complete retelling of Viaje a 800‘s lineup history here? I didn’t think so; moving on — but with 15 years’ distance from the original 2009 sessions at Seville’s Doghouse Studios with Curro Ureba, the previously-lost tracks present a new look at the scope of the band’s sound.
A full rundown of the changes between the 2009 and 2010 recordings — the latter of which became the album released in 2012 — would be academic and (again) probably wrong unless I was cut and pasting factoids like Orthodox‘s Marco Serrato guesting on vocals for the ’09 session or the guitar contribution from 2010-version producer José María Sagrista to “Eterna Soledad.” Neither of those is irrelevant, but neither gives much of an impression of the differences most resonant when setting the tracks in question side-by-side. While the finished, non-prequel Coñac Oxigenado presented itself as Viaje a 800‘s fullest-sounding recording in the low end, and the band always had a brooding element in their vocal melodies, the 2009 versions feel closer to chasing an ideal based on live performance, and so come through as both rawer in their basic sound and brighter in tone.
The acoustic strum of “Eterna Soledad” feels more direct in its folk lineage without the keys accompanying the transition from the initial verses to it, and “Tagarnina Blues” hits with more punch in its snare as it makes ready to shift into the solo, and as anyone who’s ever sat in for a mixing process can tell you, a lot can be done to change the personality of a song in minute adjustments to the balance of its component elements. As they perhaps inevitably would, the 2010 recordings feel more realized and considered in terms of the transitions from one to the next, and there’s a smoother overall sound to their production. Does that mean that the force with which 2009’s “Oculi Omnium In Te Sperant Domine” hits doesn’t work. Oh no. It absolutely does. But it’s fascinating to hear Viaje a 800 working toward two different goals in style with the same material, and where the lushness of Coñac Oxigenado became a marked example of how the band had grown since Estampida de Trombones half a decade before, Coñac Oxigenado: Deluxe Edition broadens the appeal further by showcasing a heretofore-unheard side of these songs. And frankly, they rock.
I won’t say they were wrong to trade out “Todo es Nada” for “Ni Perdón, Ni Olvido” for the 2012 release, not the least for the movement the latter enacts across a similar seven-minute runtime from a riff I likened in the original review to Megadeth to the psychedelic build that leads into its later charging chorus and multi-stage crescendo, but through its start-stop repetitions, semi-spoken lyrics and the procession it undertakes into crash and vocal effects, “Todo es Nada” offers a bleaker ambience than anything that did wind up on Coñac Oxigenado while still holding to a progressive structure and in its vocals-over-drums ending, capping Coñac Oxigenado: Deluxe Edition with an invitation to speculate at what they might have done had they kept going into the 2010s.
Does it matter? I think so, but again, I was a fan of the original Coñac Oxigenado, of the band generally, and of outfits like Atavismo and Mind! that Poti went on to found in Viaje a 800‘s wake. And if you don’t care about art or music or those who’ve made contributions in service to either, yeah, a 3LP reissue of a Spanish heavy band’s record from 2012 might not be the birthday present you’re asking for this year, but the very, very least I can tell you about Coñac Oxigenado, deluxe or not, is that it holds up, and if you’ve never engaged with the band before, these songs are a world waiting for you to find your place in them. I don’t know if Coñac Oxigenado: Deluxe Edition will be how Viaje a 800 come to receive a modicum of the respect they deserve for what they accomplished during their time, but it’s a big piece of why they deserve that respect in the first place, and this revisit is a celebration well earned.
