Austral - Tierra del Fuego (2024)

Country: Chile
Style: Folk/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
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Here's something interesting that opens in highly unusual fashion. The intro, Hain, plays out with throat drone and ethnic drums, as if it's setting us up for a Mongolian metal album. However, the Latin scholars among you will know that "austral" means "southern" and so this band accordingly hail from Chile, where Tierra del Fuego is the archipelago at the very southern tip of that nation and its neighbour to the east, Argentina, curling out into the ocean where South America looks at Antarctica. That's a very different part of the world indeed to Mongolia, even if we factor in that Austral are from the Chilean capital, Santiago, three thousand miles to the north.

However, that intro isn't misleading us. This came to me as thrash metal, but there's lots of groove metal in that sound and there's an ethnic component that simply can't be ignored. The vocals are chanted as often as they're sung and that goes as much for Nicolás Araya's lead vocals as anything in the background behind him. Luis González plays the sort of drumkit you'd expect for a drummer in a metal band, but there's plenty of other percussion going on and that often dominates tracks. That's courtesy of Jorge Saldaña, who's also credited on wind instruments, which are something I would expect on a folk metal album but not usually on a thrash metal equivalent.

And so there's folk drumming and chanting on Temawkel. There's throat singing on Kólyot. Is that an accordion on Kawésqar? Weynwayer opens with what sounds like a didgeridoo, accompanied by bass, acoustic guitar and a throat drone, and, while it's quite a heavy song, it's not metal at all. Volveré kicks off with acoustic guitar and flutes. It does bulk up, as we'd expect, but never turns into thrash metal, with the piano remaining just as prominent as the guitars. Fiu Fiu (Futaleufú) starts out in a waterfall, I think, with more flutes and a singalong, before temporarily turning up the power.

What all this suggested to me is that Austral's primary influence is Sepultura, hardly unexpected for thrashers in South America, but they're still focused on 1996's Roots rather than whatever the band has done in the almost three decades since Max Cavalera left. Even then, Austral took their influence from the folk aspects in Roots but ignored its nu metal flavour. No turntablists show up here, there are no guest appearances from trendy Americans and the result doesn't sound much like Soulfly at all.

That means that the experimentation soars supreme as they combine metal with native sounds. A song like Sigilo can start out like a heavy metal song, but in what sounds like a rainforest, with an array of ambient sounds behind the riffing. It develops with clean vocals, but finds moments that grow in emphasis to harsher voices. Midway, it drops into tribal drumming, acoustic guitar and a fireside singalong. Then it bulks up again into more overt thrash tempos and adds a throaty vocal that plays with drone. Sure, it's a long song for this album, at four and a half minutes, but it's not really a long song and it crams a lot into that running time.

The same, on a broader scale, applies to the album. There are a dozen songs on offer that total about three quarters of an hour, and Austral cram a lot into that running time. This came to me as thrash metal and I have to point out that it's often not thrash metal and sometimes not metal at all. Will that affect its success? Maybe, because labels shape expectations, but it doesn't mean that this is a failure. I found it fascinating. Sure, there's an obvious influence but it's no copy. The least metal songs, like Volveré and Weynwayer, don't sound like anything on Roots.

And, frankly, the songs that follow them, which are Ley sin Dios and Tierra del Fuego respectively, mark clear returns to metal, often thrash metal, and yet still don't sound entirely like Sepultura. I hear them, but I hear a lot of other bands too, even I'm not going to call them out as overt. Would it help if I suggested that, for a while, Weynwayer sounded rather like The Hu covering Bon Jovi? I don't think so. Would it help to throw out Manu Chao as a comparison on Fiu Fiu? Surely not. That isn't what these songs are doing, even if they hint at it at points.

What matters, I think, is that while there's plenty of thrash metal here, I think it would be better for me to call this folk metal. I recommend a lot of thrash albums to my son, who's a big thrash fan. I'm going to recommend this to him too, but because of what it is when it isn't thrash rather than when it is. He's not as experimental in his tastes as I am, but I think he'd like where Dualidad and Kawésqar would take him.

Sporae Autem Yuggoth - ...However It Still Moves (2023)

Country: Chile
Style: Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 May 2023
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While Sporae Autem Yuggoth certainly play doom/death metal as advertised, that doesn't give an accurate impression of what they really do.

The doom at the heart of their sound is deep and slow, surely rooted in funeral doom and it's aided by the keyboards of Johanna Sánchez, which add a tantalising visual element to their sound, as if a song isn't just a song but a portal into a mediaeval castle, a torture dungeon or an ancient abbey. I know that most of what she does is texture, but that probably extends to sound effects, like an odd bell or scream or gust of wind. On rare moments when the band speeds up, which they do at some point in most songs, they sound fast but they're actually just catching up to the tempos that many doom/death bands use to begin with.

The death aspect is primarily in the vocals of Patricio Araya, who doesn't sound at all like his fellow Chilean namesake, Tom. Patricio's voice isn't so much a death growl, as a hoarse croak. It's an ache of a voice that adds more to the textures the keyboards are conjuring up, bringing age and history with it, as if he's been stuck in those castles, dungeons or abbeys for centuries. Finally he's got the chance to tell his stories, but he's been so long without a voice that he has to fight to get more out than the whisper at the heart of The Pendulum of Necropath, managing it across the album with a time-honoured rasp.

Sánchez is the new fish here, as everyone else has been in place since the band formed in 2019, and their only previous release was an EP back in 2020 called The Plague of the Aeons, which featured a slightly different line-up: no keyboards, but a second guitarist, Juan Drey, who left a year later. I'm intrigued as to what that sounds like, because the keyboards here often creep in through cracks an additional guitarist wouldn't leave so obviously in place. There are songs when Sánchez sees those keyboards as a sort of second guitar, as on the gloriously titled ten minute epic Colosus Larvae: The Crimson Coffin & The Scarlet Worm. There are points where she fills in like she's a mad organist in a different part of the building who delights in joining in, but surprisingly subtly.

I should add that this is a long album and the length may be its toughest challenge, as it reaches a breathe over an hour, ambitious for a debut album. That length works for me, because this isn't a typical set of songs, it's an immersion into a particular atmosphere and that lingers even after the music is done, so time ceases to have meaning. The fact that this feels ancient, gothic not in music genre so much as in literary genre, aids that because it feels like it's taken centuries to arrive with us. If a song could be dropped, maybe Disintegration would be a good candidate because it's faster and more traditionally built for the most part and so brings us out of that atmosphere a little.

On a more traditional album, it would be a highlight and it's a tasty and mature piece, built out of rollicking riffs rather than atmosphere. It also helps to underline how delicate Disguise the Odious Spirits is on its heels. This is the true epic of the album, running twelve and a half minutes, putting it a couple ahead of Apparition of Internal Odes, Colosus Larvae, Through Dominion to Interlude, a trio of songs that run around the ten minute mark. This is the one among them that truly takes its time to set the scene and ease slowly into a build. The others all tell stories, while the third has fun with the band's roots, hinting at the Funeral March in a less overt way than Candlemass.

And I do wonder which bands combined in their minds to distil this particular sound. It used to be a given that doom/death bands owed a serious debt to Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, but that's not obvious here. I'm hearing a more continental flavour than a British one, finding inspiration in Celtic Frost, Winds of Sirius and, especially as the album builds, Candlemass. I'm sure there are an array of funeral doom bands in the mix too and likely classical composers too, thinking far beyond a Chopin nod to the way they write in such a visual fashion and play with space, especially during the elegant closing instrumental, The Night Ocean. I'll seek out some interviews to discover how they reached this sound.

I'll seek out some interviews to discover how they found this sound. I'll also play this a bit more in between reviewing other albums, because I think it's going to grow on me even more than it has.

The Black Harvest - Mortuary Dogma (2023)

Country: Chile
Style: Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2023
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I've been listening to this album for a few days now as I wrap up some books for publication and it's soaked into my skin. It feels immersive to me, the beat steady rather than slow and the production excellent. The music reminds me of Winds of Sirius, who put out an amazing album back in 1999 and vanished, but with production that the French band could only dream of. Every component is easy to follow, so we can go to ground with the dirty bass and rhythm guitar and watch the clean lead a long way above us, soaring in beauty. The vocals move between the two.

The Black Harvest have been around for a long time, formed as far back as 2004, though it took ten years to get round to a demo. That may be because it was initially a much smaller project, with the guitarist today, who goes by D.b, playing every instrument and M.v providing vocals over the top. I see that line-up on both demos, but it fleshed out in 2016 to a full band. I'm not sure when current vocalist Jorge Quilape joined, but everyone else showed up at that point, so they've been solid for seven years now.

I haven't heard their debut album, a self-titled effort in 2017, but this feels like exactly the sort of thing that should show up after a six year wait because it's well worth waiting for. The opener is a strong way to start and it establishes a sound, just as any self-titled song ought to, but Torment of the Damned promptly takes it all up a notch. This is an epic, almost ten minutes in length, and it's one to really sink our teeth into, from the tasty opening riff into the echoing opening guitar solo. It feels exactly right to the degree that if I played you ten seconds from it at random, you'd be able to tell me where in the song I'm at. That's a breakdown in the midsection. That's the home stretch with everything doubling down on the groove. That's soon in, as the intro gives way to a build and the song starts to grow.

The more I hear this album, the more I love it, but that goes double for Torment of the Damned. It keeps throwing out fresh details that I didn't notice before, little touches in the background that don't do much individually but do something that deepens the song just a little and those touches add up to a heck of a lot once it's all said and done. Nothing else here matches its length but these don't tend to be short. Insurrection Path at the heart of the album is only four and a half minutes long, putting it a couple of minutes shy of anything else. Theater of Blood comes closest to being a second epic at eight and a half, which ought to count.

There are five musicians in the band and they all play a key part. Lino Contreras is excellent behind the drumkit, but what he does is emphasised by the bass of Manuel Vera Barria and especially the rhythm guitar of Moisés Alvarado, which is a wonderful contrast to the lead guitar of D.b. The lead is always clean and it soars and sustains, in the style of Paradise Lost's Gregor Mackintosh, echoing over the other instruments. Alvarado, however, plays a vicious rhythm that's built from edges and dirt and grittiness. When he's laying down a riff and D.b's soaring over him, as happens often, the contrast is magnificent. I'd almost call it the signature sound of the Black Harvest. I'm not sure if I prefer that stretch on Insurrection Path or The Succubi Delight.

And that leaves Quilape, who underlines how genre-fluid the band are. This is doom/death, with a doom pace and a death bite, but it often moves into gothic metal. Part of that is inherent in those Paradise Lost comparisons, but Quilape emphasises it. He alternates between a death growl, that feels warm and neatly rumbling, and a deep resonant clean voice. There's some Nick Holmes in his delivery but plenty of Andrew Eldritch too and something that reminded me of a powerful monk who renounced his faith to sing darker rituals. That's at the fore during the first half of Theater of Blood, before Quilape shifts back to his death growl halfway.

Perhaps most important of all, the combination of all the above may work on individual songs but continues to work throughout the album, with every song in contention for a highlight, so that the best song becomes the one that you're listening to at any particular moment. Each one of the five musicians also has multiple moments to take the spotlight without anyone appearing to show off. Contreras remains the solid backbone to the band but even he gets moments, like the very end of From Flesh to Ashes. It may be the simplest thing he's done on the album but it stands out.

And that means that this is another 8/10 for what's been a tasty week. Notably, all three of my 8s have come from the lesser known bands I'm reviewing first before a more established band. That seems telling.

Ronnie Romero - Raised on Heavy Radio (2023)

Country: Chile
Style: Hard and Heavy
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Jan 2023
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I didn't review last year's Raised on Radio, a covers album by surely the busiest Chilean vocalist in rock music, Ronnie Romero. I heard some tracks from it and they sounded good, as well as deeper cuts from expected bands, like Bad Company, Kansas and Foreigner, but it came out while I was on my research trip to the UK and I never caught up with it. Well, I didn't want to miss out on this new covers album, which does the same job but with heavier music. Ronnie himself is as excellent as he ought to be, my biggest complaint being how there isn't much in the way of interpretation here. If you don't care about that, add another point to my rating.

I'd also suggest that the opener is a very strange choice. It's a Deep Purple song, which isn't at all surprising, but it's The Battle Rages On, from the 1993 album of the same name, the final release from the formed Mark II line-up. It's not a bad song and this isn't a bad version, but it's hardly as emphatic as the song after it, a take on Manowar's Metal Daze, from their 1982 debut. It's not my favourite Manowar song by a long shot, but it's absolutely emphatic and Romero seriously gets his teeth into the vocal. I can't see any reason why it wasn't chosen as the opener.

Romero seems to remember 1982 well, because that's only one of three songs from that year that made the cut, the other two being highlights for me. The first is Iron Maiden's epic Hallowed Be Thy Name, not just a well-known and much loved classic but one with massive opportunity for the right vocalist to showcase his chops. You know, like this one. His sustain is fantastic and he knows exactly how to soar. Sure, I've never him sound more accented than he does on this track, which is weird, but it's great to hear him sing on something this heavy.

The other 1982 track immediately follows it and that's Accept's Fast as a Shark, which turns out to be a great choice, even though Romero's voice is further away from Udo Dirkschneider's than any of the other original vocalists on any of these songs. No More Tears feels rather out of place after those two, as a keyboard-heavy ballad but Romero is excellent on it, as is Gus G as guest guitarist, suitably flash for a song by the great discoverer of flash guitarists. It's decent but unnecessary.

I've skipped over Turbo Lover, which might seem an unusual choice for a Judas Priest cover, given how poorly those guitar synths were received at the time, but it's a great pick for Romero. It's an underrated song and it gives him plenty of opportunity to shine, given how it starts so low and has a lot of patience in how it builds. There's a nice solo here from Nozomu Wakai of Destinia too. The guest guitarists generally do a great job, the other obvious one being Chris Caffery from Savatage who lends his talents to a take on The Shining, a Black Sabbath deep cut from The Eternal Idol, one of their most underrated albums. Romero fits the Tony Martin style well and Caffery does a good job stepping into Tony Iommi's shoes.

I'm not sure that we can call A Light in the Black a cover version, given that Romero has been the vocalist in Rainbow since 2015. I don't know if he sings this one live, but it's the easiest mindset for him to fall into here and he's seamless. There's no guest guitarist on this one, so that's Jose Rubio shining in an excellent, albeit very close take on the original, perhaps understandably in this one instance if nowhere else on the album. That's the oldest song here and Romero jumps from that to the newest, one reason why Kind Hearted Light is the first song that I didn't know. It's from the Masterplan debut that came out in 2003, which I haven't heard. Romero didn't sing for them but it sounds like he could have done. Roland Grapow, also known for Helloween, did play for them and he provides all the guitars here, so I presume it's highly authentic.

After another song I didn't remember,rather ironically given that it's called You Don't Remember, I'll Never Forget—an Yngwie J. Malmsteen song, in case you don't either—Romero wraps up with a really surprising choice, The Four Horsemen, from Metallica's debut album, Kill 'em All. That's not the obvious choice, even from that album, and it's fascinating to hear someone known for lighter material tackle it. He does a good job, even if his band needed more crunch to do it justice, and it works well as a closer.

Maybe I should go back and check out Raised on Radio, even if it's far too late for me to review it a year on, because this mostly worked for me. It's hardly essential, but it's thoroughly enjoyable. It also highlights why Ronnie Romero somehow sings for a dozen bands at once with guest slots on a further dozen every year. There's a big difference between quality and the ability to sing different styles well in a generally consistent manner. Romero has both.

Chaos Magic - Emerge (2022)

Country: Chile
Style: Melodic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Jun 2022
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Here's another Best of 2022, according to Folk N Rock, where it won as Best Melodic Metal Album of 2022, featuring "a magic mix of both symphonic and modern melodic power metal elements". I can't say that I'm as sold on this one as I was on Vanaheim, but it's an excellent album and it's still growing on me with each listen.

Chaos Magic appear to have started out as one of those numerous Frontiers projects. They signed a highly capable Chilean vocalist called Caterina Nix, who had demonstrated her classical and pop training in a local band called Aghonya, who put out an album in 2008 and supported bands such as Edguy, After Forever and Within Temptation. They built the Chaos Magic project around her and a name guitarist, Timo Tolkki, formerly of Stratovarius, both of whom got "featuring" credits above the project name on the cover. Tolkki was gone for album two, so only Nix's name was credited on the cover. This third album is credited simply to Chaos Magic. I guess they're finally an actual band.

And they're a good one, most of whom were on the previous Chaos Magic album, Furyborn in 2019, and all of whom are from Chile. The guitars are surely the most obvious, courtesy of Mario Torres and Nasson, because they're what vary the tone of the songs. Sometimes they go for a traditional European power metal approach, but sometimes they go with a more modern staccato approach, which isn't as effective but doesn't entirely seem out of place. Nix herself mostly sings in the pop style, but occasionally leaps into an operatic register, like halfway through the title track. I wanted more of that but it's neither frequent nor sustained.

Emerge is a decent enough opener and I enjoyed it, but it didn't knock my socks off. Even on a fifth time through, I'm digging individual moments throughout it—the intro, some emphatic horns, the soprano escalation midway—but never quite seeing it as a song. I found Beneath Your Skin after it a more approachable song, with just as many praisable moments but also a more consistent feel. I realise that it opens up with those modern guitars that tend to bore me, but they're tempered by an orchestral swell and Nix is playful on this one as she works through the first verse into a strong chorus.

As the album ran on and as I listened through a second time and a third, songs started to stand out for notice. The first were Garden of Winter and Hearts Gone Dark, late in the first half. The former has a chorus with a killer hook and it incorporates some fantastic sounds late on, including Spanish guitar. Elena Siirala of Leaves' Eyes and Angel Nation lends her voice to this one too, elevating it in elegant fashion early on but then Nix adds power to Siirala's delicacy and it's a tasty combination. The latter builds elegantly too, with plenty of keyboards from Franco Lama, to another exquisitely catchy chorus.

The next to elevate itself was Days of Lions and When If Not Today, both of which boast killer hooks, suggesting that it's the hooks that stand out and bring the songs with them. However, the latter is all the better for an excellent guitar solo and a temporary drop in intensity late on, so there's a lot more going on than just hooks.

And then it was In the Depth of Night, because of how it transitions from a soft, poppy beginning, as if it's going to be a ballad, into that modern guitar for an effective contrast. Maybe it's my own bias against that particular jagged style that treats the lead guitar as a mere rhythmic tool that has me think a little less of this album than the reviewers at Folk N Rock, but it's not omnipresent. The album as a whole feels like a European power metal album with the expected focus on melody and solid guitar solos, but with a symphonic edge, and I'm on board with all that. So I don't know. I like it. It's clearly an excellent album. I just don't love it.

So, this is a 7/10 for me. If you're a particular fan of that modern guitar sound, feel free to add one more point. It'll be a little more special for you.

Mournument - Smouldering into Dust (2022)

Country: Chile
Style: Symphonic Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Nov 2022
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This album opens so delicately that there are only two ways it can go. Either it will remain soft for the duration and soothe us for three quarters of an hour or it'll lull us into a false sense of security and then leap on us like an elephant on springs and crush us completely. Given the band's name, it won't be too surprising to find that Smouldering into Dust goes with the latter option. Doom isn't a style I hear a lot from South America, so it's surprising to hear it from a band based in Santiago, Chile, but it definitely comes in a different flavour to usual. Their Bandcamp page states that they incorporated "aspects of the deepest and most emotional tunes of traditional Chilean folklore".

The opener is On Rain and Thunder, which understands delicacy. The guitar is soft and delightful. The vocals are understated even when not whispered. There are strings before there are drums. They show up two minutes in when things get heavy but they do it even better six minutes in after another softer passage, this one focused on piano rather than acoustic guitar, with violins circling behind it and a narration floating over it all. It's definitely ambitious stuff, even before I realised that almost all this music is the work of one man, who goes by Niklas, probably because his clearly Scandinavian full name—Ulf Niklas Kveldulfsson—must seem a little unusual in Santiago.

Niklas plays all the guitars, both acoustic and electric, along with the bass, the keyboards and the piano, and even some of the violin, though most of that is provided by a guest, Caroline Salmona, which sounds a little more Chilean, even though she's actually German. Ironically; her other guest appearances are for bands based in Norway and Finland. The only other instrument here is drums, which are played by C Krono. The vocals come courtesy of A.P., who's obviously a busy man singing for seven current bands besides this one.

Niklas and A.P. are the driving force behind the band and I presume the Chilean folklore that they wanted to bring into doom is what I'm hearing primarily in the delicate sections, like the one that kicks off On Rain and Thunder, but also the entirety of the two shorter songs. That means the five minute Sea of Desperation and the three minute Rimü, which never take the plunge into doom at all, even if they share its melancholy. None of the songs that do clock in at under eight and a half minutes, with two making it past ten.

Those songs are built out of melancholy so play less like Black Sabbath or Candlemass and more in the vein of doom/death bands, the ones that don't have a foot in gothic metal. This is less about a hand crafted and polished texture, all mahogany and velvet, and more about the ache that builds out of isolation, whether that's across eternities or, as the cover art suggests, through being lost in the mountains. One of the four epics is called A Funeral Poem, but the lyrics suggest that all of them ought to count as funeral poems, so maybe the isolation stems from loss.

Interestingly, they're all sung in English, which isn't immediately obvious due to A.P.'s harsh vocal and its placement within the mix. He's an instrument here rather than a delivery channel for the lyrics. He aches at us and he wails at us in mourning, but we don't need to understand his words to feel his pain. It punctuates this and accentuates the mood but I found myself being carried along capably enough by the waves of the music behind him, slow and heavy but expansive and notably welcoming, albeit in the way that death can be welcoming. We can stay and absorb A.P.'s pain but we can be swept off into eternity by the immensity of the sound.

The only part that's in Spanish is a section in Grey Was the Chant of My Endless Autumn, easily the longest song here at almost eleven minutes. I believe it's the delicate section early in the second half, with a reprise at the end, after an unusual and subtle echoing drum part that's not ambitious enough to be called a solo. This one feels most epic here and that's saying something, given that a majority of the album feels epic and Chasm of Abandoned Souls comes close. It's surely the ending that nudges this one over the edge, not only with those drums but also the piano/violin duet that closes the song out.

I like this and I felt it deep in my bones. There's certainly room for musical growth, especially with the symphonic tag currently being represented entirely by a solo violin. However I could imagine a serious depth with full orchestration, which surely isn't here because of how expensive that would be. Maybe once Mournument are more established, they can expand that side of their sound. I'm interested to see how that comes out.

Insecurity - Intruder of Reality (2022)

Country: Chile
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

I had two thrash metal albums to choose between for a slot this week. Both were released on New Years Day and both sound good to me, but I chose this one over the other, not because it was the best per se but because it worked best at getting my blood pumping, which is something I'll never not look for in a thrash album. I do like midpace thrash that chugs along with technical proficiency, but I love fast paced thrash that cleans my clock and this is definitely the latter.

Insecurity hail from Santiago in Chile and it's their debut album, after a host of demos and a split live tapewith Suicide Club. They've been around since 2016 and they've obviously been listening to a lot of American thrash, because the influences are all over the map but all American too. That's a cover that looks like it could be from a Crumbsuckers album and there's a clear crossover feel on the opener, Deambulating Future, which rumbles along like New York hardcore punk, after a neat acoustic intro, something I still immediately still associate with early Metallica.

Where We Go... Over Again is the most crossover this album gets, but there's a little on the title track as well, where it's paired alongside some west coast chug. It's not the song that reminds me most of Testament, but it's where they came up for a lot of comparison. However, there are a lot of tempo changes, not just between mid and fast but with a very cool and almost folky slowdown late in the first half. It's an ambitious song, especially this early on a debut album, but I think they nail it. They're not revisiting Diamond Head just for a lesson in riffs, they're taking a look at their songwriting and really mixing things up. I love that.

And so we go. This is consistently built off west coast chug, with more ambitious technical chops on offer in the vein of maybe a Heathen, some New York crossover vibe for the attitude and even, on occasion, some good old fashioned speed metal. Vocalist Matias Reyes just has to be channelling a Skeptics Apocalypse-era John Cyriis scream on Stabbed by Treason. It's a fast song and it does the job of fast songs, which is that blood pumping energy. I'd love to see this band on stage!

Insecurity are a four piece band with two guitars, Reyes handling one of them alongside his duties behind the mike. He's a capable vocalist, especially for a thrash band who like their sound with an element of dirt in it, but I bet he thinks of himself as a guitarist first and foremost. Never mind if a song like The Worst of Days could have been lifted right off Testament's The Legacy; I had a blast simply following the interplay of Reyes and Kristofer Vega's guitars, especially late on in the song. Other songs just blister too, like T.F.Y., and, even if I start out impressed by Diego Carvajal's bass, like on H.S.H.T., I end up back with the guitars in the instrumental jam sections.

I realise here that I've mentioned everyone except Matias Oyarce and that's not fair because he's a thoroughly reliable demon behind the drumkit. He and Carvajal are the bedrock that Reyes and Vega can build on with their riffs and solos. Even if I found myself mostly listening for those guitar workouts, I know full well that they wouldn't be there without that rhythm section behind them to maintain an often furious pace. So kudos all around to a tight band indeed. This isn't even close to the most original thrash I've heard, even this year, but it's written well, it's played well and it's an energetic fifty minute blood pumping workout. That's a good thing.

Obnubilo - Nascentes Morimur (2021)

Country: Chile/Australia
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

It's been noticeable for a while that the metal subgenre that's being stretched most beyond what boundaries we used to believe it has is black metal. Sure, there are bands still playing the sort of raw black metal with deliberately crappy production values that we heard on the Bathory debut in 1984, but there are also bands merging the style with others as seemingly far flung as bluegrass, ambient and jazz. I don't envy the musicologists who have to track this evolution, but I can enjoy a lot of it, especially given that black metal also seems to house more dedicated musicians than any other metal subgenre. Half the black metal out there are made by one man bands and those men tend to be involved with half a dozen projects at once, with another dozen behind them.

Obnubilo is an international collaboration between musicians from Chile and Australia and this is its first release, featuring a suitably bleak title for the genre: Nascentes Morimur is the Latin for "When we are born, we are dying". All the instruments are played by Niklas K, who also wrote the music, while the vocals, both clean and harsh, are contributed by AP and Ben T. Sheehan, with the latter also responsible for the lyrics, whatever they are.

Niklas K is one Chilean part of this equation and it doesn't surprise that this is one of eight active projects for him, though he's credited under many names on the others: Ulf Kveldulfsson, NK, Kve, Niklas and Niklas Kveldulfsson for a start, with product on the shelves as Forestfather, Er Murazor, Æra, Deveneror and Swarm of Hatred. Also Chilean is AP, or Sulphur, S, Gorrge or Alfredo Pérez on releases by five other bands: Siaskel, Concatenatus, Lacrymae Rerum, Sol Sistere and The Ancient Doom. He's mostly a vocalist, though he drums for Concatenatus. Ben Sheehan is also a drummer, for Slaughter Thou in Australia, and a guitarist for Abstract the Light. He goes by multiple names too, but not so many: just Ben Sheehan and Baraath, and he only has five active projects. Whew!

So, what does this sound like? It comes described as avant-garde black metal and that seems fair, but it could be called progressive metal even more often. This opens up with strange rhythms and a bizarre urgency, as if the band was leading a psychotic waltz. Most of the vocals are clean but a harsh voice takes over at points for extra emphasis. It's jazzy, unusual and delightfully offbeat, a song that confuses on first listen but grows substantially with repeat runthroughs. And that's just track one.

With Reflections leaps more into black metal territory, with rapid blastbeats, shrieky vocals and a distant harsh call that resonates throughout. However, it has an oddly perky feel to it, with a neat melodic line and a delightfully hyperactive bass that combine to make us smile rather than escape to the forest to curse the bleakness of existence. Obnubilation continues in this vein and it's clear from later songs that aim for a similar approach that this is the core sound of the band. It spreads outwards from here, as they challenge the boundaries they set themselves, just like adventurous black metal bands are apparently supposed to do nowadays.

Unusually, my favourite songs come late in the album. Just as the first track challenged me on its first listen, the whole album followed suit and I wondered if I'd get into it at all. Repeat listens did help and this grew on me, but it never truly connects until deep into the second half.

Lost Horizons is the song that does it for me every time through. It's the longest one on offer, at a blink under seven minutes, and it does acquire an epic feel as it goes. Initially, it's nothing special, just a jagged feel that doesn't seem to have anywhere to go but that groove grows and grows and I found myself in an odd place where I was hearing all sorts of different bands at once. There's Joy Division here and Voivod and King Crimson and often at the same time, as the song hints at The Court of the Crimson King and Nothingface and Transmission, songs I've never previously thought of in a single breath. I can't fully explain it but it got well under my skin and I love it.

It's followed by These Solemn Words, which is even better in ways that are easier to explain. It may be the most prog metal song here, starting mild but interesting and growing as it goes. It also has a groove to it that continues to build, but it's not as overt as on Lost Horizons. This one grows with dynamics as much as simple progression. Icy Barren Steps wraps things up with panache, for three out of three memorable songs at the end of the album, this one featuring some intricate changes that I adored.

It's rare for me to find the strongest material late but this is hardly a traditional album. Even with these songs, it's the feel as much as anything that makes them work for me, something that's not easy to pin down and is always inherently subjective. The reasons why I dig these particular songs so much may well be the exact reasons why you don't. I know that a lot of people don't like Voivod because of their feel and, if you're one of those, you probably won't like this either. I can't call out songwriting, because it's obscured. It's hard to recommend it on a traditional line. It's not riffs or hooks or melodies or structure.

Everything comes down to feel so, if this review has piqued your interest, I'd recommend checking it out on YouTube, especially these later songs, and find out if it does the job for you. It may well. It may well not. It's certainly not going to be for everyone. It's not entirely for me, but I can tell it won't leave me alone and I like that.

Travis Moreno - Umbral (2021)

Country: Chile
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

I have no idea who Travis Moreno is but, even though they're named for him, he is not part of this psychedelic rock band from Chile. Google mostly gives me results for this band which I'm guessing isn't named for the high school student here in Arizona who's good at basketball or, I assume, the sales consultant who works for Buerkle Motor Co Inc in Hugo, Minnesota. I guess it'll have to stay a mystery, but that's somehow appropriate for a band who have so little interest in defining what they do within a single genre. Sure, this is psychedelic rock but that's certainly not all it is.

The opener, Astrovela, is a pulsing, driving effort that brings the Ozric Tentacles to mind. It makes us think that the album will stay psychedelic above all and move into space rock in a very organic way. Of course, it doesn't because it has little interest in repeating itself. Tornasol Fuego kicks off so smooth jazz that it's almost lounge, though it's never entirely traditional. These musicians are always aware that there's a different note or chord to use instead of the obvious one and it keeps us very much on the hop. It's like Peter Gabriel-era Genesis interpreting Tony Bennett and it ends up truly wild, evolving from maybe my least favourite song to maybe my favourite section (except maybe the second half of La Piel de las Sombras).

By the time we get to Selva, it all becomes a blissful sort of organised chaos. It's jazz and prog and fusion. It leans heavily into the experimental, at once insanely tight and completely loose, and we start to think of "progressive" in a krautrock sense of "near impenetrable weirdness that we can't help but like without understanding why because we don't have a degree in musicology". It's this Travis Moreno that I appreciate the most, which is good because it's the most frequent mode that the band play in.

The opening couple of minutes of Selva are outrageous and fascinating, often sounding like a pair of songs playing at once rather than just one. The rest of the song isn't far behind and others are quick to follow in this vein. Fantasma often plays in exactly the same ball park and Copia Feliz does much of the same thing but with even more frantic urgency. When Travis Moreno decide to turn up their complexity levels, they're impossible to ignore. The opening of Tornasol Fuego excepted, this is never going to be background music, whether you dig it or not.

Arguably the most progressive track here, and perhaps not uncoincidentally the best (though I've not given a shout out yet to the delightfully intricate Somnolencia), is the album closer, La Piel de las Sombras, a neatly evocative title that translates to The Skin of the Shadows. While it's clear to me that the band are seeing a very wide range of Latin music indeed as their bedrock, meaning a lot more than merely the various eras of Carlos Santana, this quite obviously delves the furthest into unusual instrumentation.

It has lots of room for that being a breath under nine minutes in length, but bass player Cristóbal Ulloa shifts onto sequencers, flute, ocarina, maracas, acoustic guitar and claves, along with some instruments I had to look up, like huiro and Peruvian cajón; drummer Jorge Rubio adds timpani, djembe and bottles to his repertoire; and guest musician Claudio Sánchez joins in on electric and acoustic guitars and cuica. The latter is a Brazilian friction drum; a huiro may be a guiro, a hollow gourd played with tines over notches; and cajón is a box drum often played with hands. As you can imagine, there are a lot of interesting rhythms on this song, even getting punky late on!

Travis Moreno call what they do "a harmonic/lyrical exploration", which sounds like a pretentious way to say vocal music but it's not unfair. They "pursue multiple escapes" from the "basis of rock", using "a strong connection and roots with the Latin American poetic universe." That sounds very pretentious too, but it really does describe what they do well. This is rock music that often isn't. It ought to work best for those listeners who miss the days of truly progressive rock, which polarised opinions and rewarded those with open minds and the willingness to listen to unusual music many times to figure out what it's doing.

And it's been a while since I heard something that challenging but ultimately rewarding, maybe a year because Neptunian Maximalism is the last band that rang that bell for me.

Tripulante - Lickan Antay (2021)

Country: Chile
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I thoroughly enjoyed Tripulante's debut album, Mensajero del tiempo, a couple of years ago, but, as good as it was, it felt like a band coming together. They were a new band, that debut appearing only a year into a musical partnership of vocalist Aymarita Colque and multi-instrumentalist Julio Cesar Moya. I felt that the latter dominated, not through any discrepancy in talent but simply in the opportunities that the songwriting gave him, but that's emphatically not the case here, with the two finding the balance I hoped they would on this, their second album.

It starts out well with Sotar Conti, which is a vibrant and up tempo opener with hidden depths, but I have to say that the album didn't grab me by the balls until Ckuri, which wraps the first half and sets us up for the second, which just keeps getting better and better. The early tracks are all good ones and none of them let the album down but, however many times I listen through Lickan Antay, I leave it convinced that the second half exceeds the first.

The better balance between vocals and music is one obvious change, but it's not the only one. For a start, I believe Mensajero del tiempo is sung in Chilean Spanish, but this isn't, though I'm unsure as to which language or languages it is sung in. Google isn't much of a help here, but I'm assuming that Colque sings in at least Kunsa and Quechua, because Heutur translates to Rise in the former and Amawta is a skilful or wise leader in the latter.

As for the album title, the Lickan Antay are an indigenous people of the Atacama desert, who are found in northern Chile and Argentina and into Bolivia, while this album appears to be an attempt to pass on knowledge from various Atacaman cultures, presumably including theirs. That may be a difficult task when it's done in languages I can't identify, but I applaud this approach and hope to learn more about what's actualy going on. The only other word I can identify is Chakana, which is the Incan stepped cross.

All this leads to another more surprising change, which is that there seems to my uneducated ears to be less of an ethnic flavour here. It's obviously there on the interlude called Alikhantu, with its heavy use of Andean flutes weaving in and out of each speaker. Also, at least one song appears to be, if not an actual cover, an interpretation of an older Chilean song, and that's Lalcktur Cuijai, an easy one to find on YouTube by O. E. Galleguillos Colque, a surname which makes me wonder if the neat melodies on this one were written by a relative of Aymarita Colque.

I presume at least most of the rest is original, because the overt influences here are metal bands like Iron Maiden and Helloween, not only in the heavy/power metal genre sound but in the way the guitars develop and the songs build. There's even an epic to wrap up the album in Gentiles, a sustained gem even at eleven minutes and change. The first half of it is great but then it steps up even further as the keyboards swirl six minutes in, out of which emerges an excellent riff to start the escalation of the second half.

It's definitely one of my favourite tracks here, but there are others. Ckuri isn't the first song here to highlight just how well Colque can sustain notes, but it's impossible to miss how she doesn't just hold notes for extended periods but does interesting things with where those notes go. Each time I listen through the album, Ckuri stands out more and more, as does Heutur after it, making them a rock solid heart to Lickan Antay.

Oddly, because Tripulante only need help when performing live because there's just no way Moya can play everything there that he does in the studio, these are also the two songs featuring guest vocalists. Ckuri has a second powerful female voice in Cinthia Santibáñez from Chilean prog metal band Crisalida, who I now must check out, and Heutur features Yen Squivel as the male voice that counters Colque's.

I really dig Colque's vocals throughout this album. As I mentioned last time out, her pitch is lower than we might expect for a female metal singer but she still has quite the range. There are points where I think she's stretching too far upward and then she soars beyond it to highlight how it isn't a problem for her at all. I'm intrigued as to who influenced her the most, because I hear a heck of a lot of Bruce Dickinson in her voice, which makes obvious sense, but he's not alone and I can't see who else is in there.

So to rating this. I gave Mensajero del tiempo a 7/10 and this is clearly a step up on that excellent album, but some of it is two steps up. I'm seeing it easily as a highly recommended 8/10 and now I have to echo what I said at the end of my review of the debut but even louder: "I really can't wait for the next album! Let's see how they can grow!"

Aqviles - Memoria Fósil (2021)

Country: Chile
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 26 Mar 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

There's so much fantastic music coming out of Europe at the moment that I could fill two slots per day from that continent alone, but I'll keep trying to cover as much territory as I can. And if could focus on a different continent, it would be South America rather than North America, because, while they have far fewer "major bands" and a much shorter history, there's a freshness in the music coming out of all the countries down there, a vibrancy and a sense of invention that really appeals to me. Throwing on a new album from somewhere in South America often serves as a palate cleanser for me, replenishing my faith in music as an art form and not just an industry.

Case in point: Aqviles, a progressive rock band from Santiago, Chile who have been around since 2004 and are on their second studio album, after 2015's El Último Hombre Bala. Their sound is fascinating to me because it feels soft and laid back even when it isn't. There's a lightness to it that I'm hearing a lot in South American albums lately, but this isn't surface music. Radio en Alerta, for instance, which is the first song proper, lasts under four minutes, but features some energetic bass work behind patient guitar, some unusual time signatures and a really cool slowdown in the second half that almost turns doomy, without ever being metal. There's a lot here, even when there doesn't seem to be.

Aqviles are a rock band, but I call them progressive rock because of all the experimentation going on in these songs. At first glance, some are soft rock and some hard rock, the overall spectrum the band goes through ranging from soft jazz rock in the Steely Dan vein to harder grooves rather reminiscent of Budgie. That's quite the range, but it's consistent in tone, even when it's flirting with other genres, like funk on Espectador de Terrors, or Spectator of Terror; pop on Astro, which is driven by a riff that almost feels like Robert Palmer levels of perky; or jazz on at least part of most of these ten songs.

I have to call out Fernando Urra first, because his bass is dynamic and so obvious that it often becomes the lead instrument. Diálogos is well named, because it's almost a dialogue between abrasive guitar and warm bass, with the vocals a third wheel. This one makes me wonder just how much the guitar of Diego Lillo is doing, because I'm starting to believe that what I initially thought were keyboards must be the guitar with a different tone. He uses quite a few, including a beautiful fluid one for overt solos like the one early in Espectador de Terrors that counters the ominous bass with its purity, or early in Surcos en la Piel, or Furrows in the Skin, which is almost pleading.

That leaves Rodrigo Pérez, who's a versatile drummer and needs to be to play along with this pair. He doesn't seem to do a lot compared to Urra and Lillo but, the more I listen to this, the more the drums start to emerge as an equal partner, not just the support behind the others. After all, he's credited on percussion as well as drums and there are points where he shifts from the latter to the former for the more ethnic sounding rhythms. He does a lot too, even though the gaps in his spotlight halfway through Astro are just as important as his beats.

I should also add that, if all the guitarwork wasn't enough, Lillo is also the vocalist, making Aqviles a trio. Maybe that's why this music breathes so much. However much these three musicians do, we can easily follow any of them when we choose. I love when I can listen to a song as a song, but then listen to it again as a vocal performance and a guitar performance and a drum performance. It's rare in the 21st century to be able to listen to a song as a bass performance, but I'm really happy that I can track Urra's contribution to this album without hardship.

Like many albums that seem light and airy at first glance but quickly highlight that there's really a lot going on, this is one to explore through multiple listens. Like many such albums, it's also tough to call out favourite tracks, because it's always growing. The bookends, Radio en Alerta and Brumidor, stood out for me first. Then Espectador de Terrors refused to be ignored. Surcos en la Piel staked its claim. Astro was obvious from moment one but it grew over multiple listens beyond that adrenaline shot of a riff. And so on and so on. Every song spread out and grew on me. And, in my book, that means that this is a real keeper.

Rise to the Sky - Let Me Drown with You (2021)

Country: Chile
Style: Atmospheric Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | VK | YouTube

Circumstances have led to me listening to the first third or the first half of this album on half a dozen occasions now. It's becoming an old friend and a very comfortable one. This is atmospheric doom with plenty of emphasis on both of those words. Doom is seen as slow and depressing, and rightly so, but in the right hands, it can become exquisite and, whenever that happens, it tends to become uplifting for me. This definitely becomes exquisite at a lot of points and sometimes outright sublime.

Rise to the Sky is a one man band, Sergio G. from Santiago, Chile, playing every instrument, and he's a little quicker with them than a lot of doom metallers would be, without ever getting quick enough to leave the genre. Maybe that helps it feel a little perkier, but that's not a good adjective to use here. I would go with majestic, because these are patient slabs of doom where everything feels particularly huge. This is epic doom to play insanely loud in the ruins of ancient cathedrals. I get the impression of Sergio being about ten feet tall and all his instruments scaled to match.

The rhythm section here is what makes it sound majestic, though I'm aware that the rhythm section is the same guy that's singing and playing lead. With his rhythm section hat on, he's creating those vast power chords and cavernous beats and making us think this is all way bigger than it is. Occasionally, he calms down, like halfway through Dream the Pain is Gone or during the waterfall-fuelled beginning to Let Me Drown with You but we still don't lose that illusion of size. It just feels more natural, like we're being shown not the wonders built by generations of craftsmen but by millennia of incessant wind and water.

Either way he goes, that's the backdrop he provides to his other selves, wearing lead hats. There are eight songs proper here, plus an interlude at the heart of the album to separate the sides, and much of it is taken up by what plays to me like duets. His guitar goes high, soaring with the angels, while his voice goes low, growling like an elemental, and the contrast between the two is powerful and almost omnipresent here.

I'm not sure what meaning we should take from that but I often imagined these two as representing players on a grand stage. Maybe the guitar is the gods and the voice the last Titan or the human race. Maybe the guitar is our mortal world and the voice is the land of the dead. Maybe the guitar is simply the force of good and the voice the corresponding force of evil. However I thought of it, it was always played out patiently over aeons with neither side ever able to do anything but communicate. The two worlds can't mix except in musical form here courtesy of Sergio G.

The most obvious flaw is that everything I've said thus far holds true however we look at this album. It holds true if I'm talking about an individual track, like See Me Fall Down or Turn Us into Stone. It holds true if I'm talking about the two sides, separated by only Passion. And it holds true if I'm talking about the album as a fifty four minute piece of music. It's reasonably fair to say that each of these eight songs is doing much of the same thing in much of the same way. Sure, there's a female spoken voice during the title track, Liebestod kicks off with some neat violin and whatever's Sergio is doing late in Turn Us into Stone is quite the eye opener, but there's not really that much variety to be found here. It's not what the album is about.

And that's likely to be your decision point. If atmospheric doom is your thing and you can just immerse yourself in it all day long, then this is a peach of an album that ought to be high on your must buy list. It's the third Rise to the Sky album since 2019, with another one due in September, and, while I haven't heard those, it seems reasonably safe to think they ought to be must buys too.

On the other hand, if you like atmospheric doom but it doesn't make your heart sing, you'll probably want more from this one than it wants to give you. It does what it does, very well but pretty much the same way throughout. But hey, like anything I review that piques your interest, check it out wherever you like to check things out and see what you think about it.

Lapsus Dei - Sea of Deep Reflections (2020)

Country: Chile
Style: Progressive Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | VK | YouTube

I came to this album believing that Chilean band Lapsus Dei play doom/death metal, and yeah, there's some of that in here, but it seems like it's a long way back in their history. They've been around since 1998 and this is their fourth studio album, their first since In Our Sacred Places five years ago. It plays more as progressive metal to me, with predominantly clean vocals, a strong sense of perky doom and at least one leg in the hard/prog rock era of the seventies.

For instance, The Call of Sirens feels fundamentally rooted in doom but far forward in the band's evolution, as if Messiah Marcolin's era in Candlemass had evolved into a prog band, adding folky keyboards, Led Zeppelin riffs and a David Gilmour solo, even enhancing the latter with a little Fleetwood Mac edge from The Chain.

It does make for an interesting sound and the result is highly Scandinavian, so much so that it's hard to reconcile that this is a band from Chile. Were I listening to this blind, I might imagine someone like Amorphis, circa the point with Am Universum that they moved away from their original sound into something more progressive and hard rock in nature, but newer, less overtly catchy and with a tinge of a band like Soen.

Only one song is sung in Spanish and it's Naufragos, the longest song on the album and another one that feels like it came out of doom but got faster and perkier. The swirling keyboards are so light that, however demonstrative the beats, I was too uplifted to feel doomy. Given that the title translates to Shipwrecks, that ought to feel a little odd. Somehow I left it wanting to be shipwrecked.

Naufragos pretty much finishes halfway through and goes instrumental. That means a fresh Gilmour-esque solo and it's very confidently delivered. I like this sound a lot but I have to admit that I found myself anticipating where it was going at points, as if I'd heard these particular changes before. Was Rodrigo Poblete drifting into Shine On You Crazy Diamond or did he just nail the underlying sound behind it?

The Last Trip is the first song to feature death growls and, by this point, we're almost halfway into the album, so we can't see it as one of the band's primary focuses any more. However, The Last Trip, and Colossal which follows it, are excellent slabs of atmospheric doom/death, if still brighter than we might expect.

The doomiest song on offer here may be Alone I Break, not because it ditches any of the keyboards but because they float so achingly over a neat dirge of a riff. Like so many of the songs here, it finds its mood and milks it well, even if half of it features clean vocals and the other half harsh.

It's all extrapolated forward so far that it's hard to imagine where Lapsus Dei started out. I look forward to working through their back catalogue to find that out. For much of the album, I'd suggest a Paradise Lost influence, as there's much in Alejandro Giusti's voice to suggest that he's listened to a lot of Nick Holmes, across multiple eras, but the music often suggests My Dying Bride instead, especially during the second half of the album.

Either way, I like this a great deal. Every album I hear from South America adds to my wish to hear more. This is very different from the prog I've been reviewing from there lately, but it's just as welcome.

Tripulante - Mensajero del tiempo (2019)

Country: Chile
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jun 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Tripulante may only be a trio but they sound like a much bigger band, maybe because they're ably qualified. They're from Calama in northern Chile, but they trained in the neighbouring nation of Bolivia.

Vocalist Aymarita Colque was a concert pianist who studied for a Bachelors in Music in La Paz. Julio Cesar Moya, the band's composer who provides all of the instrumentation, studied at the National Conservatory of Music in La Paz. His recorded output is wildly varied, running the gamut from hardcore punk to heavy metal via folk fusion and he also studied under the Peruvian jazzman Ernesto Loyola.

To keep Moya's resume growing, this is a power metal album with some local flavour added to the mix. Colque sings in Spanish, of course, but there are a few folky touches here and there, most obviously in a brief instrumental called Sobrevigencia, or Survival, that serves as an intro to Cruz y espada (Cross and Sword). That's not remotely enough for Mensajero del tiempo, or Messenger of Time, to count as a folk metal album, but that ethnic flavour isn't absent.

Most of what we get here is Julio Cesar Moya as a one man band. He provides the guitars, bass, keyboards and some of the drums too, performing material that he wrote. It's powerful and intricate stuff, led by his guitarwork but with textured keyboards and rumbling bass backing it up. It's telling that he never seems to be a player of one instrument, even though the guitar is clearly dominant. When he plays the keyboards, for instance, he isn't doing it just to back up his guitars, he's doing it as a keyboard player.

On some tracks, the drums provide the usual accompaniment, like on Paniri, named for a Chilean revolutionary, Tomás Paniri. On others, they keep the beat slowly but add a lot of fills, as if the idea is for the drums to be a lead instrument at this point. He doesn't take that idea too far but it's there and just noticing it is a compliment to Moya.

And then there's Aymarita Colque, who's a powerful singer who fits the power metal style wonderfully. I like her voice when she's not stretching herself at all and I like it even more when she ramps it up and allows her notes to really sustain. She has some serious pipes, as she perhaps shows us best on Ancestralidad (or Ancestrality), on which she demonstrates both a range and a power that's highly impressive. Her voice tends to be lower than we might expect for a female vocalist, but she has range and I adore the high note she keeps hitting on the second repeat of the title!

Oddly, she's not as pervasive as we might expect her to be. This album runs 35 minutes and only the two short intros are instrumental, but each time I listen through it, the more it shifts from a regular vocal led album to an instrumental affair on which she shows up reasonably often to add vocals. I must say that she's a very welcome addition when she does, but the point is that the album would work without her, albeit on a utterly different level, while it couldn't exist without Moya.

In a way, this makes it the best of both worlds. It feels like an excellent instrumental album, but with the vocals of Colque a real highlight. I know that sounds ridiculous because it can't be a vocal album and an instrumental one but that's how it seems to play.

Like the Чиста Криниця album from earlier today, it's very consistent, but in its style as much as its quality. There's not a lot of variety on offer but the band do what they do well and it's hard to choose favourite tracks. I think I should shout out for Ancestralidad because Colque is so good on it, but I don't dislike anything here. Is the title track better than Cruz y espada or Como el cóndor (Like a Condor)? Who cares? They're all worth your time.

While the musicians aren't new, Tripulante are, this being their debut album only a year after coming together as a band. If they're this consistent this quickly, then I really can't wait for the next album! Let's see how they can grow!

Xul ov Kvlten - Entropic Increase from the Omega Aeon (2019)

Country: Chile
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 2 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

This album caught my attention for a number of reasons. For a start, Xul ov Kvlten are a black metal band from Chile, where they really like their thrash. They're also called Xul ov Kvlten. How do we even pronounce that and what does it mean? And, even realising that black metal album titles are traditionally overblown, what the heck are they going to be singing about on Entropic Increase from the Omega Aeon?

And then I pressed play and, shortly into the opening track, Ascend Pathos Signis Dómini, with its black metal guitars, surprisingly slow drums and keyboards floating above everything like a choral cloud, it starts to feel familiar. Is that Tchaikovsky's Slavonic March? I do believe it is and it provides structural bookends to the song, which ends with wild laughter.

Yeah, this band has my attention. I know that black metal has always had an affinity with classical music, but this is overt and it elevates this album, especially through the use of keyboards. The other surprising bit comes much later towards the end of The Primordial Chaos Synthesis, when the band pause their blitzkrieg for a moment to churn in a sort of ritual.

It seems that Xul ov Kvlten, who hail from Santiago, were formed in 2014 and this is their first full length album, coming after only a 2016 EP called Nitimur in Vetitum. They're a trio, with Amon on guitar, Xul on bass and Funebre on drums. Xul also handles the vocals, which were what stood out for me for special notice.

Musically, they're clearly capable but, the classical nods aside, there's nothing in the music that will surprise anyone who's listened to black metal for more than about five minutes. Once past the opener, they're at speed pretty much throughout and this blisters along for fifty frantic minutes with nothing else particularly notable except that ritual piece. It's just good at what it does and simply doesn't feel much of a need to be groundbreaking or experimental.

Xul's vocals, however, are fascinating. He growls more than he shrieks, but not in a death metal style. He howls and he laughs and he rages. He punctuates and he accompanies. At points he even seems to converse with himself in a Xul duet, like he's the little angel and devil on his own shoulders advising him how the next ritual should be performed. In short, he feels less like a singer and more like a magician or, hey, a twelve foot demon. Why not? This is a lot more Satanic than it is pagan.

His voice is delivered with notable, even flamboyant, confidence all the way through this album, as if he's ordering us more than he's singing to us. While the lyrics are primarily in English and Xul is more intelligible than most black metal singers, I couldn't quite discern what he wants. On The Primordial Chaos Synthesis, he clearly wants us to give him something but I couldn't tell what. Maybe it doesn't matter.

On Iconoclastic Nihilismus, which pauses at one point for him to go a cappella, it feels theatrical and that leads me to an odd takeaway. I often wonder how bands would sound live, but I wonder what Xul ov Kvlten look like on a stage. There's no way these guys are just going to stand there and play. There has to be a show too and it has to be interactive.