GLUE

Comprising material that was put together in the late 1960s but not released until 1971 - due to the political situation in the country making it impossible to release the album! - Laghonia's glue must have seemed like kind of a throwback even when it first came out. Garage psych in a mid-1960s style, it sounds like these guys had managed to listen to some smuggled-in Hendrix or Love albums, since they deploy a similarly guitar-driven, chaotic sound, with just the lead singer's accent and a touch of traditional music here or there (like the backing singing on Bahia) to suggest that this is in fact a Peruvian band, not a second-string Haight-Ashbury group from the hippy era. It's all good enough fun, but it's not first-class stuff, or even especially innovative - then again, even being able to operate as a rock band during the years of a dictatorship was a fine achievement in itself.