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Live Review, The Cellar. Oxford 11/01/06/
Deguello are down with that whole stoner rock thing: grinding and insistent basslines rumbling away underneath heavy, overdriven guitars, battered into shape by pounding drum lines. Their basslines are great – circular, repeating shapes thrown into a morass of feedback and fuzz. Deguello’s speedier tunes bring to mind that whole Amphetamine Reptile sound of the early nineties – a proto-grunge mess of destroyed tunes – and they augment it with some interesting elements. A lap steel introduces echoed soundscapes into parts of the set, and there are several brief journeys into abstraction which hint at a band that’s capable of more than simplistic noise.

Review For 4xEPs from www.daredevil.de
…Degűello must have smelled the stench of good old Crust and Hardcore too much...these guys are simple, intense and have no mercy...ok, they’re not that fast, but I think the vocals give this stuff an extra kick...the one moment he’s crawling and the other moment it’s a smooth whisper and in the same second he screams like a f**ing burned cat...excellent stuff…

Review of Earwig? Demo Nightshift Magazine
February 2005
 ‘Planeta Maimutelor’ is a lo-fi sludgy mess of riffs and cascading drums with vocals no more than a gravelly roar; there are echoes of a hundred long-lost mid-80s American hardcore bands in there, especially Art Phag and Cows and it’s rough and ready and utterly devoid of subtlety. Likewise ‘Buffalo-ver’, leaning closer to The Dead Kennedys and Motorhead, while the hidden third track offers a Butthole Surfers-style reworking of a song and is sure to induce indigestion in the sturdiest of constitutions.

from diskant.com DEGUELLO - Earwig? (self-released CD-R)
The etymology of the word "Deguello" (pronounched DEG-WAY-O, there's an umlaut on the "u" but this thing went crazy when I tried to put them in) is gorily fascinating. The Spanish word signifies beheading or throat cutting, but "El Deguello" was also a song played by the band in the army of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna in 1836 during the final assault on the Alamo by the Mexicans - a hymn of hate and merciless death, played to spur the men forward - variously interpreted as literally meaning "no quarter" or "no mercy" and representing, in the particular case of the battle for the Alamo if nowhere else, the fact that the army would spare no lives, and have no regard for their own in order to secure victory. It is thus a fitting moniker for one of the few vital bands from this country right now that can be considered "rock music", although this label does about as much to convey the power, enormity, noise and twisted poetry of Deguello's music as the word "folk" does to describe Bob Dylan. "Earwig?" was recorded and self-released on CD-Rs before the band recorded three more songs and re-recorded one of the songs here for a split record on Oxford's Hanging Out with the Cool Kids label, but I still love the versions of "Planeta Maimutelor" and "Buffalo-ver" presented here, in all their bloody vengeance, ten-thousand ton fuzz and reel-to-reel, bass-heavy static. This is the sound of a young band who not only have "found their feet", but nailed them to the floor and played guitar so loud for so long that their flesh was stripped from their bones. The vocals seeth from the speakers like a secret plot, then explode with horror when some gargantuan but very human tragedy is suddenly stumbled across - "IT WAS THERE, IT WAS THERE ALL ALONG!" whilst the drums hammer home some undeniable truth that if you don't get, soon, you're gonna be buried under the rockslide guitar. But the best thing about these two tracks is the fact you can dance to them so hard, for so long, and they never, ever get boring. Believe me, I've done it a lot, especially when these dudes play live - and Deguello live is an assault of entirely different proportions, at the same time terrifying and captivating, brutal and frail, all whiplash hair and piercing, heavy resonance. Hunt them down and get loaded.
posted by joe luna on Sunday, January 08, 2006