Right off the bat, let me say that this CD is better than it looks. The hyphenated bandname, logo, and layout could have easily been warning indicators for Hispanic groove metal, but luckily there's no such shit here.
If you've read my blogs, you know I have a fascination/mild obsession with the Heralds of Oblivion comp., and I was initially curious about this CD because I saw the drummer for Decomposed played on it. As it turns out, ANOTHER Heralds alumni--Emilio Marquez--also plays on it. There are 8 musicians pictured on the inside cover...So the guitarist and bassist were in Prophecy (CA)...There's a guy credited with "samplers" (this will come into play shortly)...Karlos Medina of Evildead/Agent Steel fame plays on a track...Oh, and there's a guy playing drums on that same track:
YEP. I honestly did not notice it was Dave Lombardo the first time I looked at the booklet; I guess the knit hat made him really inconspicuous.
The music itself is pretty generic mid-'90s style death metal. A couple of riffs get a bit more groovy than I personally like, but nothing to an offensive degree. "Fe muerta" has an acoustic guitar intro and some sludginess which makes it marginally more interesting than the other tracks. The combination of a production on the lo-fi side, the rumbliness of the music, and the Spanish lyrics do make them sound like a Mexican/Central American DM band.
However, from the very first track you'll notice there are sound effects in the background, courtesy of Mr. Samplers. Things start off relatively lightly with pulsating electronic sounds and simple synthish stuff, but he seems to be emboldened as the CD goes on, and delves into more cosmic-sounding, oscillating effects. I'm neutral about the effects overall. There's some vaguely The Terminator score-sounding stuff that adds a tiny bit of atmosphere, but even the most out of place effects are too minimalist to be a big disruption. Weird stylistic choice, but hardly the most bewildering musical embellishment on a metal album.
End of the disc has three cover songs:
"Desvaneser al abissmo" - This is Metallica's "Fade to Black." In English. They even put spacey effects here, and it's probably the highest concentration of them! Weirdly interesting as a "cosmic" version, but the whispered vocals at the beginning are dumb.
"El enviado del infierno" - Transmetal cover. WHAT A TRAINWRECK. Here, the effects are very intrusive; before the guitars started, I thought this was going to be some sort of ridiculous electronica version. Obviously just a throwaway track to show off Lombardo's guest drumming.
"Celula" - Cover of a Mexican band called Caifanes, who I had never heard of (I attempted to check out the original on YouTube as a point of comparison, but I bailed when it got uncomfortably close to mariachi music). The cover doesn't sound very much like what I did sample and seems like an extremely loose deathdoomy interpretation. Approaching it just as a metal song and not as a cover, it's fairly decent except for the out-of-tune clean vox.
