Trémolo - Sin Llorar (2023)

Country: Peru
Style: Hard & Heavy
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 3 Mar 2023
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Trémolo have been around for a long time, since 1995, but they've been sparing with releases, this being their first in no fewer than fifteen years and only their fourth overall, but I wonder if line-up consistency has played its part. Only Elías Fuentes, lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, was on all of their albums and, in addition to him, only lead guitarist Reynaldo Rojas was on Detrás de la puerta in 2008. Rojas is easily the highlight of the album for me, his fluid guitarwork elevating everything he touches from the very opening of the opening track.

The title track kicks off the album with a Rojas solo and there's another, more substantial one still to come in the second half that's delightful. Márchate opens with excellent guitarwork too and the rest of the ten songs on offer don't find him resting on his laurels. He's somewhere between Slash and Michael Schenker and that's not a bad place to be. What's especially notable is that he clearly has the talent to perform outrageous solos but he mostly chooses not to, focusing instead on a far more simple but always elegant approach. This album would be elegant without him, because that is inherent to the songwriting, but it wouldn't be as good.

He channels Slash most obviously on Márchate and Enamorado de un Ángel, but neither ends up a Guns n' Roses song, for a number of reasons but mostly because Fuentes doesn't sound at all like Axl Rose. He has a much sweeter tone that fits well with the elegant musical approach, though he can turn on emphasis whenever he likes, whether that's by ratcheting up emotion or power. While he sings in Spanish, so I don't understand most of the lyrics, he has excellent enunciation so those of you who do speak Spanish will be able to understand both his words and any further depth he's layering into them.

Between the two of them, they create a strong album. It has all the melody of melodic rock but in a framework with a bit more kick, usually hard rock but occasionally a little heavier again, such as Zorro y la Llama, which is built a clearly heavy metal riff. Rojas's solos tend to feel more like they're designed for metal songs than rock ones, even if they fit perfectly with whatever everyone else is doing. Enamorado de un Ángel, for instance, is surely a rock song, packed with emotion and more of that seventies organ floating in the background, but there are points where we can believe it's being performed by a heavy metal band aiming for a power ballad.

There are lots of other touches that suggest that something heavier will come. Rosas Negras has that power ballad approach too but, like Enamorado de un Ángel, it's not soft. Vencerás has a sort of Somewhere in Time-era Iron Maiden vibe when it kicks off, though it moves in other directions when it grows. Tal Vez kicks off with elegant piano that suggests a symphonic metal song, but it's got other ideas again. Before the organ shows up to flavour Corazón de Luchador, it kicks off as if it's a Dirty Looks song, Oh Ruby without the Bon Scott impersonation in the foreground. There's a comradely backing vocal too that wouldn't be out of place in folk metal, appropriately given that even I can translate that title.

Less overtly metal, for the second album running for me, after the latest Godsmack, there's a song here that reminds me of Like a Stone. Here, it's Te Besaré and that feel is in the first solo, which is different to any other on the album, and some of the vocal escalations. There's even a melody on Tal Vez that's surely borrowed from the old "Here we go! Here we go!" football chant. Trémolo do a lot on this album and it all works to some degree, often a high level. I've listened to this for a few days now and really need to move onto something else, but I'm not quite ready to do that yet. It's good stuff and every song's a winner.

Mauser - Más Fuerte Que la Muerte (2022)

Country: Peru
Style: Hard and Heavy
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 18 Oct 2022
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I'm liking a lot of what I'm hearing come out of Peru nowadays, because it's consistently good and because it arrives in greater quantities than it does from other South American countries except for Brazil and Argentina, both of which are far larger. What's more, I'm not discerning any overtly Peruvian sound, so these bands tend to surprise by how different they are from each other, as they do from Finland and Greece too.

Mauser are merely the latest Peruvian band to show up on my radar, but they sound very good to me. They hail from Miraflores, which is a district of the capital Lima, and they're on the hard rock side of the boundary with heavy metal, even though they do cross it. This is an all important third album for them, following a self-titled debut in 2014 and a follow up, El fin, in 2019, which I believe means The End and thankfully wasn't.

I like their sound best when it's at its heaviest, which means a sort of early Dio sound, if you recall the stormers that he tended to start his albums with, songs like Stand Up and Shout and We Rock that were his most metal. That often happens early in songs here, including the title track, Voces and Llevas Dentro. Not all of them remain that heavy, which is fine because Mauser shift between genres well, but they do the urgent parts even better. What's odd is that vocalist Alex Rojas, who's clearly been listening to Dio for a long time, doesn't imitate him too often, though there are parts where it's unmistakable, especially in his sustains and in his phrasing at the end of Hey!, which is a combination of Dio and Chris Cornell.

Hey! is a great example to throw in here, because it fits seamlessly within Mauser's general sound but takes it in another new direction. This is a looser, bluesier song from the outset and it includes a stellar guitar solo from César Gonzáles that's hinted at in the opening. It's Gonzáles who may be most responsible for the variety here, because what tone his guitar has on a particular track is the most important element of flavour. Much of his influence seems to be from the eighties and I have no doubt that he's a Vivian Campbell fan, but there's plenty of nineties here too, as the grungier and groovier aspects of the title track suggest.

In fact, those two styles merge there, when the atmosphere of Cruces, the intro to both that song and the album as a whole, shifts into song proper. Initially, it's that Campbellian sound, playful and elegant. Then the title track kicks in almost like a melodic thrash song, as if Campbell had handed over to Alex Skolnick. And then, just to keep us on the hop, it shifts into groove metal, albeit firmly on the hard rock side of the fence, so making us think grunge. It's a very nineties sound built on an eighties base with some nods back to the seventies too.

While I automatically respond to those urgent songs, I think my favourite here is Explotaré, which is hard to define too, because it adds prog into the mix. It's initially accessible hard rock, the firm confident vocals of Alex Rojas leading the way but also in conversation with Gonzáles's guitar. But, right before the first minute is up, it drops tantalisingly into acoustic mode, only to power back up in a Nirvana-esque transition. The same thing happens again a minute later and then further into the song at greater length, because the acoustic side takes us home instead of transitioning back up again. It segues well into the piano and rain of Hey! too.

In other words, there's a lot here and the particular ways by which it's mixed sound like they might be unique to Mauser. To me, that's an automatic recommendation. I like bands who sound only like themselves, even if I can spot obvious influences here and there. Mauser kept me on the hop and I liked that a lot. Now I should track down their first two albums.

Purple AQP - Rise and Fall of the Inca's Empire (2022)

Country: Peru
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 11 Jan 2022
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I try to mix up my review schedules, both daily and weekly, to ensure a firm variety of bands from across the rock and metal spectrum and around the globe. That can be tough in the first couple of weeks of January, when I'm restricted to what's been released this year thus far and it turned out that I reviewed a French heavy metal album and a Peruvian hard rock album today that aren't the musical distance apart I expected. The Losts are certainly metal and Purple AQP are hard rock but they do stretch into metal at points too. I'm going to stick with hard rock as my label,but they're a heavy hard rock, that's for sure. It doesn't shock me that they have a page at Metal Archives.

They're certainly in your face from the outset, with a clear emphasis on war as subject matter, an appropriate theme given the title of the album. I don't know that this is a concept album, but it's definitely themed. The lyrics seems to match the sound effects in intros and narrative moments, a collection of anger that affects the tone. I should mention here that the lyrics all appear to be in English, though the narrative bits aren't always. I have little Spanish but I don't think I need it on this one.

The core sound is an interesting one and I'm struggling to place it. Sure, the first band that sprung to mind were Motörhead, because Empire Arise opens rather like Deaf Forever, but that's not the direction the album goes, not really. There's some Tank too, but maybe that's just shared subject matter leading me down the wrong path. I read that the Purple in Purple AQP is apparently a nod to Deep Purple, just as AQP is their home town of Arequipa, but they're far from Purple clones. I'm not hearing anything Gillan or Blackmore here, for a start, except on the closer, Computer God, an obvious Blackmore riff leading into Gillan or maybe Accept territory.

Also, while the first half of the album plays very consistently, there are moments where they go in a surprising direction, like the vocals on Cross Keeper that are clean during the verses but find a deliberately extreme emphasis in the chorus. It's so wild that I wondered if there was an unlikely guest appearance. The second half brings plenty of surprises too. Forty Bitch has a sassy slant to it that's still hard and heavy but with a very different tone to everything that went before. Then The Sonar adds some Hawkwind, even some Yes, to proceedings, though the song evolves back into the usual approach.

What surprised me most is the discovery that this is a one man band, that man being Victor Calvo, who's therefore responsible for all the instruments and the vocals. I fully expected the band to be made up of different musicians who brought very different influence with them. In particular, the drummer often feels like he's playing in a metal band, but the guitarist and bass player are more than happy to stay with hard rock, the latter having a lot of fun on the instrumental Demon of the Dark. The vocals move a bit more between the genres, but mostly remain on the hard rock side of that boundary. Yet, they're all Victor Calvo. Why is he more metal behind a drumkit?

All these questions fascinate me, but they don't affect the quality of the album. This is interesting stuff and I enjoyed it. Sure, Forty Bitch seems a little out of place when it shows up and even more once the entire album has done, but it's not too far adrift. It's also a good song. Maybe it's newer, having first appeared on a compilation album last year. Six of these ten songs were on the band's 2019 demo, Empire Arise, so they're older. And that suggests that Cross Keeper is one of the new songs, with its nod to extreme metal. Suddenly I'm really interested in what a second album might sound like.

Necrofagore - Into the Gloom of the Buried Valley (2020)

Country: Peru
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2020
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It's been a while since I've reviewed anything from Peru, a country which I discovered last year is punching well above its weight in the rock and metal worlds, especially with psychedelic rock which this emphatically isn't. In case you couldn't extrapolate from the name Necrofagore, this band is firmly a death metal outfit. They're from Lima and they've been around since 2007 but have only released two albums thus far, this one and Macabre Finding in 2013.

It would seem that there's something of a death metal scene in Peru too, as each member of this band has belonged to a bunch of others, often a plethora of them, all with quintessentially death metal names. Vocalist Nun'sfucker (at which name I naturally rage at the inappropriate apostrophe), one of a pair of guitarists, also plays in Demoniac Slaughter, Impalement and Eternal Exhumation, though with two albums behind them, Necrofagore have now become the most prolific of that bunch.

This is old school death metal, a churning morass of downtuned guitars, bass and demonic growling vocals, akin to early Autopsy. It sounds rather like a pit looks and that's no bad thing. The more I listen to new bands recording old school death metal, the more I'm enjoying it. I'd drifted away from the genre long ago when brutal death got boring but, with melodic death now the default form of the genre and sounding less and less extreme with each year that passes, this seems like a better and better alternative.

Of course, the production is much better than anything in 1989 could boast, because of the advent of 21st century technology. Drumming has moved on too and AnHelles does a fantastic job behind the kit here. The music varies in tempo considerably and he's as good fast as he is slow and churning, with a fast foot action while playing achingly slow with his hands. He hooked me a song into the album, with blisteringly fast fills moving to total stops at the beginning and at points during The Incestuous Beast.

Necrofagore are a four piece band, the other two members being Ripping Soul Collector on bass and Sadistik Kali on guitar, both of them new arrivals. I like what everyone does here, though it's sometimes hard to focus past those drums. There are two guests I'm aware of, Alex Okendo of Colombia's Masacre adding vocals on Tombs Under the Hecatomb; and Sergio Ferreyra, presumably of Imetheos, providing vocals on the excellent Malignant Dust of Cemetery; it looks like they were a Venezuelan band who relocated from Caracas to Lima.

The songs are so consistent in quality and sound that it's easiest to listen to this as a single 45 minute piece of music, unless you really want to dive deep. The one track that stood out for me was The Incestuous Beast, though I loved the guitarwork under the incessant drums on the closer, Ancient Trees of Sacrifices, and the eventual slowdown too as it grinds down to a close.

I've liked everything I've heard from Peru over the last year, whether it be the groove metal of Prometeo, the psychedelic rock of Spatial Moods or, at the top of the heap thus far, the hard rock/heavy metal of Regum. All these bands make excellent music that sounds entirely different to each other's. I can now happily add Necrofagore to that growing list. Whatever's going on in Lima right now, keep it going on!

Spatial Moods - Cae un Mito (2019)

Country: Peru
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Aug 2019
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Peru is quickly becoming my surprising country to go to for quality new rock and metal. Sorry, Greece, you're not surprising enough any more (but I still love you). Spatial Moods are an interesting psychedelic rock band with a lot of space rock in their sound and enough prog rock that I keep on hearing the strains of 21st Century Schizoid Man in Anime, un Mito.

I liked the opener, Mar de Escorpio, but Anime, un Mito found its groove at the outset, stalking and swaggering and then adding a very surprising vocal from Jorge Apaza Frisancho that sets up an interesting contrast. It's high and sweet and delicate and it's deliberately buried in the mix, which has a particular fondness for bass and guitar. It rocks on out, but too quickly as this is the shortest song on the album, albeit at five and a half minutes.

The rest are seven minute jams, 333 especially, given that it doesn't seem to have any particular destination in mind. It's best towards the end when it gets all playful. I could imagine the band creeping quietly over a stage in Victorian nightshirts, teasing the audience, only to face them and rock out again. I liked it a lot but I'm not sure if those couple of minutes had anything to do with those that went before.

Besitos de Hormiga starts out like a Satanic lounge band wondering if their audience will be OK with them playing Dazed and Confused but never actually getting to the point of doing so. The bass is ready but the guitar has some introspective quest to complete first and, by the time that it shows back up in the same reality, the band has moved on.

I enjoy this album greatly. I must do because I had it on repeat all through the night while I worked on a convention program book. There are wild hordes of sounds here rampaging through this album that I appreciate. I'm just not entirely sure if any of the songs come off sounding remotely coherent. And, without that coherence, the album shifts from tracks I enjoy to tracks that aren't going to play in my head later.

I ended up concluding that, as the band's name suggested from the beginning, they're more interested in exploring moods than writing songs. Amancaes, for instance, begins with each of the four band members playing different songs that just happen to be entirely compatible. A wild cacophony brings them to some sort of agreement as to how to proceed. It's a fascinating track. And, after it seems to lose the plot completely, it wraps up beautifully in sync.

For sound, it wouldn't hurt to think of early King Crimson as a stoner rock band being booked to play a jazz club and shifting up accordingly every now and then so as to not lose the gig. It's a great album to set running in the background while you're working, knowing that it'll grab your attention at a completely different point every time.

Prometeo - Aurora (2019)

Country: Peru
Style: Groove Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Jun 2019
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Prometeo translates to Prometheus in French, Italian and Esperanto and many others, I'm sure, including Spanish, the language this band sing in because they're from Peru; they sent this in after I reviewed Coffin Rags and Regum. I love how scenes coalesce even when bands don't play in the same style. Unlike those groups who play black metal and hard rock/heavy metal respectively, Prometeo are a groove metal band.

And they're a good one. Colisión, the first track proper, kicks off with an absolutely textbook set of escalations, except it switches out the last step into fast thrash for a heavy groove instead. Prometeo play heavy throughout, often achingly so, and they play very tight too, but they resist that speed element, even though there are a whole slew of points where we think they're about to let loose.

I wonder how they would have sounded had they gone there. Profetas is a pit starter for sure and it's about as fast as they get. I think quite a few of these songs would sound more intense at higher speed, but they'd lose some of their heaviness in the process and that's not what Prometeo are looking for. Instead they use Luis Lopez's drums as a way to ratchet the intensity up and down as needed.

I'm not the world's biggest groove metal fan, but this is good stuff. To me, groove metal needs a tight sound, solid riffs and vocals that are both tough and melodic. That's not an easy set of attributes to fill, especially with as much of it reliant on good songwriting as good performance, but Prometeo have them all down. Check out the melodies in the title track, which always stays heavy even when the guitars and the vocals are getting all melodic. Intermisión does the same thing too, really well.

Part of it may be the fact that the band doesn't only feature two guitarists but two vocalists too. Percy Sonan and Christian Bjork handle the guitars in the expected sort of way, one holding down a riff while the other solos. The vocals are more interesting, because there's a male vocal and a female vocal but they're not always easily distinguished. Is that Beatriz Farfan leading the way on Yo but Leo Vannucci on most of the others?

Their collaboration leads to some really interesting sounds. Often they sing the same lyrics together for depth. On Treinta Monedas, that'll be Vannucci in front but Farfan right behind him like an improvisational echo. She's not a prominent part of the mix but she's there and she deepens the sound. What's more, on Intermisión, there's a whispery evil to the vocals which I presume is due to the two singers combining superpowers but it never leaves heavy or groove metal for a more evil genre.

Valientes is an odd one. I keep hearing old Paradise Lost songs in bands of late, but it's generally been the old doom/death Paradise Lost. Here, it's Draconian Times-era Paradise Lost because there's plenty of Once Solemn in Valientes, once it starts chugging, but always with the benefits of modern production. It's not just the guitars either but the vocals too, which feel reminiscent of Nick Holmes at that point.

I like this album, but I'd like to see them live even more. These guys ought to kick ass in a small club. Hopefully, now that they've been signed by the American label Rotten Brain Records in a two album deal, they'll get to play somewhere a little closer to me than Lima. Sure, they're just down the west coast, but there are nine countries in between.

Oh, and they have the best intro music I've heard in a long while. I really hope they come out on stage to Alea Jacta Est because it's a magnificent setup for a metal band.

Regum - Regum (2019)

Country: Peru
Style: Hard Rock/Heavy Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 20 Jul 2019
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If Coffin Rags were a good warm up for today's double bill from Peru, Régum are a great way to finish that up. I've had this one for a while and I like it more with each listen. They play it hard and heavy, with some songs more on the rock side and some more metal. They ought to do well with both those audiences.

They start strong with Refugio and Laberinto, but Linea Blanca just bounces with pent up energy and refuses to let us be. Moisé Huamán capably sets the vibe on drums, giving life to the song that the rest of the band play along with. Vocalist Joaquín del Castillo gives everything he's got on this one, his raw voice working really well and he even finds a really nice high note to put the icing on the cake. It's an impressive rocker.

There are nine songs here, none of them bad, and three of them killers. I'm fond of the fact that each of those killers is unlike the other two.

Duende is even more upbeat and bouncy but it's an alternative song, starting out as punk pop and ending up as glam metal without changing anything but the voice that's singing. That's del Castillo on the chorus; is it him in a different style on the verses too or does someone else step up to the mike? This one ought to be a real singalong song in Spanish speaking countries and should be firing up the airwaves in Lima.

The third is Ritual Canavis, which starts out with voice and drums like it's a Quiet Riot-style belter. Then it leaps from idle into high gear with the energy and some of the style of early Guns n' Roses, especially given that the guitars are a focal point here. Eloy Valdez gets a decent solo and Deyvi Hidalgo on rhythm bolsters the whole song wonderfully.

The opener, Refugio, is arguably a fourth killer, because it flows so well, again due in large part to those guitarists. It's heavier than those other three, but still carries a strong melodic line with del Castillo searing his throat just as much. It could be my favourite song on the album, though I'm not sure how to explain why except just personal taste. I like the balance of precision backing and raw vocals. I like the escalations. I like the way it ends on the turn of a dime. I just plain like this one.

And there are another five tracks that are all worthy. If Refugio is one of my favourites for vague reasons, yours could be any combination of the songs for your own vague reasons. Each time I listen through, another one grabs me for some reason, whether it's the guitarwork on Sonrisa Nocturna or the cool opening vocal on Poder Corrupto.

I feel that this is unusual for me to say, because I've got used to there being standout tracks on any album just from an objective standpoint but, here, they're all worthy and eager to engage with you. It's like wondering why you picked that particular puppy to adopt rather than those other eight. I guess it means that this is a damn good album.

Coffin Rags - Ascensión Omnisciente del éter (2019)

Country: Peru
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 14 Jul 2019
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Coffin Rags, from Lima in Peru, state on their Bandcamp page that they're "a project born under spiritual instincts of a constant search of the secrets that lie in the subconscious, the ritualistic meditation through archetypal passages and manifestations of the dead, the occult and the alchemical give form to these thoughts and designs."

I'm not entirely sure what means but a quiet four minute intro in the subtly pulsing Tangerine Dream style of the seventies might be a good way to draw us into a meditative state. However, it gives way to the louder first track proper, Espectros del Arjé, and that's only ever going to wake us back up. I find that black metal is often about tone, whether a band can find that evil sound that they can play around, and Coffin Rags have an excellent tone, if not a particularly surprising one.

They alternate between fast and slow sections across seven songs of wildly different lengths, two minute interludes to nine minute epics, with the mix putting the jagged guitars well above the drums (though the cymbals shine a lot brighter than is usual). The bass is presumably in there somewhere, but mostly as added texture, with bassist Lord Dartheniod much more obvious as the band's vocalist. His vocals don't accompany this music as much as they float through it like mist.

I like his approach though. I don't expect to catch lyrics in black metal, especially when the band are from Peru and likely to be singing in Spanish, but Lord Dartheniod often sounds like he's not using language at all, just exhaling at length in a suitably Satanic style to drape a layer of texture over the music.

With a good tone and a good vocal approach, Coffin Rags are a worthy black metal band, but the songs do run into each other. If I wasn't paying close attention, I'd have heard Espectros del Arjé and Augurios del Arúspice as a single sixteen minute track. It's the dark ambient interlude that breaks it (them) apart from Satyros Pan, a faster and delightfully evil sounding song. Coffin Rags inserted a cheesy demon speech into Espectros del Arjé but the chanting and other vocalising late in Satyros Pan is much more effective. I have to say that it's easily my favourite track on the album.

As there are really only four tracks proper here, that just leaves the most substantial, Manipulación del Espíritu, which almost reaches nine and a half minutes. It rumbles gently into play with the bass finally audible early on, then explodes into action a few minutes in. It's best in its mid tempo parts but ultimately and surprisingly is the least track on the album.

I like Coffin Rags and not only because they have such a cool name. They're pretty traditional in what they do, but I see that they're describing their sound as black/death metal, so maybe they'll be mixing it up a little for a second release.