by Saby Reyes-Kulkarni
“We understand that being from L.A. has its stigmas. Well, fuck you.” So begins the official bio for the band Dios (Malos). Written by guitarist Joel Morales, the document reads more like a manifesto than the typical excruciatingly one-sheet. But if Morales has a chip on his shoulder about the slew of preconceptions the band faces, at least he has the decency to try and entertain us with it.
Though he gracefully maintains a respectful tone, Morales makes it clear that he’s grown weary of his band being compared to The Beach Boys, who also originate from the band’s hometown, the Los Angeles satellite city of Hawthorne. The members of Dios (Malos), Morales points out, are native Angelinos. And he isn’t happy about how “true” L.A. culture gets eclipsed by the artifice that defines the city and serves as its main export to the rest of the world. As bassist JP Caballero explains over the phone, 80 percent of Dios (Malos) is of Mexican descent, but grew up “fairly Anglicized.” Some of the band members, including Caballero, don’t speak Spanish. “The people who want to give you shit about that,” says Caballero, “are usually the ones who try to take the culture and use it to attack other people to give themselves an identity.” Cultural background, he says, is something he and the band want to arrive at naturally. Still, the superficial expectations begin to compound when you’re a Hispanic band from an L.A. beach community, and particularly when you make homemade, adventurous 4-tracked pop and like sunny vocal harmonies. But Dios (Malos) never sought slavish imitation of institutions like The Beatles, nor do they own many records by assumed comparable iconoclasts like Los Lobos or Pavement. But the fact that the music immediately sparks these comparisons only betrays the band’s comfort with themselves. Dios (Malos) is emphatically not enamored of irony or detachment. Caballero, in fact, refers to American society as a “post-sincerity culture of irony.” And the band knows how to be goofy without coming on too strong—not unlike someone with nothing to prove. While the music sparkles with reverb and giddy hooks, humor hovering like a fine mist, the band casts long shadows and drapes its songs in dourness. It weighs on you like a long, heavy raincoat on a nice day. These are slippery songs that evade categorization, even as they might at first appear familiar. That you can readily identify them as pop—and catch passing glimpses of a benign, spectral Beach Boys presence in it—only reflects how masterfully Dios (Malos) extract cohesion from variety. “Ultimately,” Caballero says, “we’re into giving each song its own little world, its own environment.” Which bodes well for the listener—just bring a raincoat.
