My Dying Bride - The Ghost of Orion (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
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I can't just walk straight into a My Dying Bride album. I usually find that the most effective way to approach such a creature is to pour the thing over me slowly so that I can acclimatise to their exquisite sound. As usual, the first half hour or so washed off and away from me, but the sheer majesty of The Long Black Land stuck and captured me utterly and I lost the next couple of hours to the band.

This is their lucky thirteenth album, thirty years into their career, and it lush. Only Andrew Craighan and Aaron Stainthorpe are still on board from the beginning and the former provides all the guitarwork here, because new fish Neil Blanchett didn't join until the album was done. It's also the first to feature Jeff Singer, formerly of Paradise Lost, behind the drumkit. Bassist Lena Abé has been with the band for over a decade now, as has Shaun MacGowan on keyboards and violin.

The band's sound has always remained identifiably theirs even with a musical shift or three over the years. This is emphatically doom metal but with some death on the side, Stainthorpe shifting to death growls at points on quite a few songs. The gothic metal aspect mostly manifests through the violin and guest cello from Jo Quail, which provide an elegance that fits the relentless slow pace. Every note is chosen as carefully as the lacquer on a magahony Victorian box or the polish on a brass fitting.

The album breaks into sections for me. The first includes three songs, which include the two singles thus far, but oddly it's the least worthy section to me. Sure, it simply reeks of anguish and can't be ignored but, compared with what comes later, it sounds like an excellent band warming up. The interlude between this and the second half is The Solace, an even more emotional piece that's entirely bereft of bass or drums. It's entirely solo guitar, if never guitar solos, and it's directed by the guest folk vocals of Lindy-Fay Hella.

And then we get serious. After half an hour or so, my breathing had slowed to match the music as if I was entering a meditative state and it's here in The Long Black Land that I fell fully into sync. It starts well with Quail's cello and a slower pace even than before, teases at speed with a neat churn or two and adds emphasis with a death growl from Stainthorpe. But then the midsection truly captured me.

I'm writing this in self-isolation due to COVID-19 but this transported me somewhere where I felt truly alone (but on board with that). The keyboards set the scene and the guitar and cello decorate it. The drums, at the point when they show up, tease exquisitely. Two minutes later, the full band crash the scene with utter majesty and take me slowly home. This is precisely what "power and glory" is meant to describe. The second half of this song made me feel like I was immortal and, only when it suddenly ends, was I shaken back to mortality.

The Long Black Land is a second shy of ten minutes and The Old Earth nudges just over that mark, kicking in with more folk before turning it way up with some exquisite crescendoing. It's preceded by an interesting title track, an elegant set of whispers with acoustic guitar accompaniment that allows us a moment to recover from the previous song and prepare ourselves for the next. It's followed by a choral outro.

And we briefly quantify our state of being before launching right back into the album again to find that Your Broken Shore is a grower. As tends to be the case with My Dying Bride, I look forward to many hours getting to truly know this album. It's a safe 8/10 for now. Let's see if I raise that later.

Voodoo Six - Simulation Game (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
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No less a luminary than Steve Harris of Iron Maiden has been "keeping an eye on" Voodoo Six and it seems like he's become something of a godfather to the band over the years. They've already supported Maiden in Europe and they're about to support British Lion on tour in December. Then again, Tony Newton, bassist and co-founder of the band is Maiden's live sound guy.

Now, I reviewed the British Lion album earlier this year, with Harris on bass, but I think I like this more. It's clearly hard rock rather than heavy metal, even if the opening riff to The Traveller is a little reminiscent of an Anthrax mosh part. The band formed in 2003, so they're hardly new, and this is their sixth album so far. Alongside longterm members Newton, drummer Joe Lazarus and Matt Pearce on one of two guitars, they've added Tom Gentry of Gun on the second, and a new lead vocalist, Nik Taylor-Stoakes.

What impresses me here is that, even with so many connections, they aren't a clone of Iron Maiden at all. In fact, they aren't a clone of anyone that I'm able to conjure up. There are obvious influences but they're merged well and none of the songs really sound like anyone else. And here I should highlight that Simulation Game is emphatically an album of two halves that are further apart than we might expect if we only listen to one or the other.

I adored the first half. I caught hints of Maiden in some of the dual guitar breaks, but also hints of Led Zeppelin and even Jethro Tull, among a variety of others. The influences are generally from the seventies and eighties and primarily British, but these songs sound apart from anything else I've heard from the New Wave of Classic Rock thus far. I heard different people in the vocals of Taylor-Stoakes too, most overtly Sean Harris of Diamond Head but also a lot of David Coverdale and even Chris Cornell.

Overall, I think the biggest vibe I got here was Diamond Head, not because a single song sounds like them but because the general approach plays similar. Each song features a progression of different riffs that are often simple in themselves but add up to something complex when plugged together. The vocals play along with that, adding a more soulful layer over the top of the music. The biggest difference is in the density of the sound. Diamond Head like to stay stripped down and let the riffs speak for themselves. Voodoo Six prefer a denser sound that adds more texture, including what sounds like strings.

Only time will tell, of course, as to whether any of these songs gain iconic stature the way that so many of Diamond Head's have. The band sure give it a good shot though. The Traveller, the majestic Gone Forever (my favourite song here) and Inherit My Shadow are each really solid tracks on a first listen that get even better with a second and third. In between them, Liar and a Thief takes a bit more time to grow but I wonder if it's even better. Last to Know finishes off the first side well.

And my biggest problem with the album is that the second half doesn't build on that start but takes a wildly different approach. Instead of being rooted in classic rock and NWOBHM, with contemporary layers added, it's much more alternative in nature, albeit with far more strings. That Cornell influence becomes really overt on Lost and stays throughout the second half. Brake and Control clearly take their influence from the noughties and both feature the strings far too much for my tastes and in more intrusive ways: they add to The Traveller but detract from Control. The latter rocks more than Brake does, but all these songs feel grungier, American and more alternative.

There's also Never Beyond Repair, which is a ballad and the first song here to leave me entirely cold, but only One of Us really grabs me on the second half. And that leaves me in an odd place for a rating. The first half is an easy 9/10 for me, some of the best songs I've heard this month. The second, however, is more like a 6/10 with some of it lower, so I think I'm going to have to even out to a 7/10. That's going to rankle with me, though, so I'll plan to come back to this in a week or so and see if I want to bounce it up a notch.

Waltari - Global Rock (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Mar 2020
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The boundaries of rock opened up a lot in the nineties and there may not be a better example of a band who embraced that than Waltari. Their 1992 album Torcha! ran the gamut from rap to speed metal, a former punk band covering Madonna, and they've only expanded on their musical tastes since then. This is very much for the open minded, so much so that some of this goes too far even for me.

Case in point: opening number Postrock, which combines crunchy metal guitar and autotune, the oddest combination of styles I can imagine. Metalheads are not always averse to other genres of music, even chart pop, Billie Eilish a surprising name on a lot of metal lips nowadays. But rock music generally is based in live performance and autotune is anathema to that mentality. I'm a hater of autotune myself because it sounds awful to me on anything but the most abstract electronica. I don't like this song because of it.

That said, it's only used for effect on this one song and not throughout it, while the rest of Postrock sets the stage for a lot of what's to come on the rest of the album. This is pop music but it's metal music and there's enough of each to underline both. The choruses here are pure pop but the backing is metal and the midsection is as far from pop as it gets, with duelling guitar solos and prog phrasing. We're not in Kansas any more, Toto.

The question is whether such a wide variety of styles can co-exist within a single song because Waltari don't merely alternate heavier songs with light ones, they combine those styles within songs. They mostly confine themselves to the pop/rock/metal spectrum, so they're not as wild as, say, Mr. Bungle, but they often bring Faith No More and Babymetal to mind. I'd especially say the latter because of the frequent use of pop vocals, often saccharine ones, over a metal backdrop. The latter is more obvious in the shifts of style not only within songs but sometimes, as with Metal Soul, within lines.

Wikipedia currently tags Waltari as avant-garde metal, alternative metal and progressive metal, but I think they need to reevaluate that given how much a lot of songs depart entirely from metal here. Skyline is the extreme here, a song that kicks off with AOR phrasing, then adds a little heavy guitar for a moment before a fundamental shift to hip hop over electronica, finding a pop chorus within a minute. It's not really my thing but it is done well and I'm not going to rail against it the way I did the autotune on Postrock.

What it does is variety and it does it well, just as do so many other songs here. No Sacrifice starts out like a churning Slayer number with vocals that range from Rage Against the Machine to Ozzy Osbourne; halfway through, it's all symphonic before that Slayer riff kicks back in. Sick 'n' Tired reminds of Oasis with less of an accent until it grows into a Peter Gabriel number. Going Up the Country is a popped up blues song, a sort of Spirit in the Sky type spiritual chant but remixed by a DJ. Orleans kicks off with a driving metal riff in the vein of Accept but adds in some electronic woops and some country blues slide. There's a lot here.

The wildest song may well be Boots, which shifts from an R&B influenced acid intro to an arena metal number rather like the Scorpions, before becoming a sort of cross between a rave and an aerobics routine. And yes, the title is referring to the Nancy Sinatra song, These Boots are Made for Walking, which is re-interpreted for the chorus, even though this isn't a cover of that or the Megadeth take on it. It's remix culture gone wild.

The most varied songs are the most interesting ones here, though it'll take an open mind to appreciate all of them. What gets me most isn't the variety but the lack of acknowledgement of what's cool and what isn't. That may well be what impresses me most here, because Waltari aren't just mixing extremes, they're doing so in any way they want, even if it means incorporating arena rock, AOR or the nu metal that's all over The Way, even though it does get a little more older school as it grows.

The most forgettable songs are the ones that don't care to get remotely that imaginative. There are a lot of them here, thirteen full songs taking up an hour of play, so it shouldn't be too surprising that some of them are rather forgettable, especially towards the end. Sand Witch is easily the best late song with its transition from folk into power metal and post-punk.

All in all, this is a wild journey for anyone with the balls and the disdain for trendy labels that's required to really get it. I admired this more than I enjoyed it but there are still songs I wouldn't mind playing a lot. Kudos to Waltari for making something this interesting.

Feastem - Graveyard Earth (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
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Knowing I'd be reviewing the new Waltari album today, I looked for something as loud and raucous as possible to balance against it. Feastem looked like a great choice, given that they were formed in 2005 "to play the fastest, most pissed off grindcore imaginable". I wouldn't say that they succeeded but the band are certainly fast and pissed off, even if the quality of musicianship is high.

The downside is quickly obvious, if you'll forgive the pun. Feastem's fourth album is their shortest yet, over in under twenty minutes, which is way too short for an album. Just call it an EP instead, folks, or even a mini-album, anything to highlight that it's really short. Then again, their longest thus far, 2011's World Delirium, was still shorter than Reign in Blood, albeit a little closer. I'm docking a point here as a token complaint about length.

While I've seen both thrash metal and death metal associated with Feastem, I don't hear that here. This is old school punk played fast and ferociously to fit firmly in the grindcore category. There are no guitar solos. Every song here kicks off fast, finds a groove and explores it briefly before wrapping up. There are fourteen tracks here, only one of which makes it past the two minute mark. Two of them don't even get to a minute and the powerelectronics outro is longer at 1:14 than half of the actual songs. It's kind of like DOA on speed or early Discharge with more buried vocals.

Fortunately, the music is excellent. The band don't care about gimmickry, so there's no gore or porngrind here. They're more old school punk politicians, railing against the current state of world affairs, the title track being as telling right now as anything else I've heard during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's certainly pessimistic but, frankly, lyrics like "Mob mentality, a hive mind in frenzy, the corpse of civilization, the wreckage of hope" could have been written about my local Walmart this morning. Then again, that could be Walmart any day, pandemic or not.

Even if this is perfect music for those with attention deficit disorder, the songs don't get old. I enjoyed this as much, if not more, on my fifth listen as on my first. Certainly the riffs, which are all simple but effective, are surprisingly memorable for grindcore. I Will Never Kill manages to cram two such into a minute and both are so simple but so effective that I could well wake up in the morning with them playing in my head.

That's not to say that there aren't more ambitious musical elements here. I rather like Sortovalta, the first of five songs in Finnish, because the riff is rather like a call and response between drums and guitar. It sounds great and it doesn't sound like anything else here, highlighting a variety that I don't often hear in grindcore, where the in your face effect is the one and only point. No, you're not going to hear a sitar or a trombone or something else wildly adventurous for the genre, but you're not going to hear fourteen takes on the same song either.

For a start, while this is generally just as fast as you'd expect, there are songs here that slow down. The title track evolves nicely, benefitting from a whole two minutes and ten seconds of running time, more than anything else on the album. That's not typical, of course, but there are moments in a few other songs that highlight how Feastem don't need to spend all their time at a hundred miles an hour. Terror Balance has a neat section that's far slower than the rest of the song too.

I liked this, even if I wanted a lot more of it than Feastem were willing to give me. I reviewed a few albums last year that are longer than this band's entire back catalogue put together and that includes four albums, a couple of EPs and a couple more split singles. Remembering that Reign in Blood was released on cassette with the entire album on both sides, maybe Feastem can throw out a cassette version of Graveyard Earth with the entire album twice on both sides. I'd still listen through the whole thing.

Crematory - Unbroken (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Industrial Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
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I haven't listened to enough industrial metal but it's a subgenre that needs to grab me to work and I struggled with this one a lot. Crematory have been around since 1991 and this is their fifteenth studio album so they certainly don't sit around getting bored. "Music is an addiction, my first love and my religion," they sing on the title track, which opens the album. It's clearly autobiographical, as the "29 years and still alive" line vouches.

However, their sound has evolved a great deal since they began. Rather than simply changing, like so many bands do, they've added new genres into their core sound and never really got rid of the old ones. That's both successful and, well, not so successful for me, because there are bits that I like here and bits that ended up just annoying me.

They started out as a death metal band, a genre that's most obvious nowadays in the lead vocals of Gerhard Stass. He's oddly high in the mix, the backing music feeling a little subdued behind him, which is odd for industrial. The reason for that is probably because they've ended up close to the NDH sound of bands like Oomph! and Rammstein, who thrive on their vocal hooks.

From death metal, they grew into gothic metal and that's very obvious in the first few tracks. The title track has very little goth to it, but Awaits Me adds a lot, not least an accompanying clean vocal from Connie Andreszka, and Rise and Fall brings even more of that into play. There's also a melancholy piano that sits behind songs like Rise and Fall and leads its melody. I like these songs the most here and wonder about how the band sounded during their gothic metal years.

The biggest problem for me is that I started to enjoy the accompanying vocal a lot more than the lead. Stass sounds best for me when the music behind him is most aggressive and when he doesn't try to underline his growling. Behind the Wall is surely the best example of both, a hard driving industrial track with a good hook, a memorable chorus and a lot of electronica backing both, even a guitar solo that sounds like Rolf Munkes is standing on a gantry with sparks launching off his guitar in all directions. The Downfall fits that as well, with a Sisters of Mercy type drive to it.

However, when the music gets less emphatic, Stass seems to want to push his growling style further and it doesn't work for me the way he clearly wants it to. My Dreams Have Died is a great example, because it almost seems like Stass is a death metal fan doing karaoke to a generic industrial song. when Andreszka chimes in, I realised how much I missed him. He didn't need to add his voice to Behind the Wall at all but I was happy when he returned on The Kingdom and especially here.

I wondered about whether he could lead an industrial band on his own because his voice is much more subtle than Stass's: warm and rich but not remotely as dominant as we might expect with industrial; he felt more suited to prog goth. By the time we get to songs like Inside My Heart and Voices, though, I became sold on him as the lead with Stass serving as texture. Like the Tides wraps things up with only his voice and it worked for me.

While Stass's vocals were the biggest problem for me, the album also runs a lot longer than it should. It's a very generous release, with fifteen songs totalling over an hour, and that's before we factor in the bonus disc. It's a lot of music, and all credit to the band for being that generous, but the uninitiated like me are likely to find it too much. There's not really much here that isn't covered definitively in the first eight or nine tracks. The album could have jumped from The Downfall almost to the end and miss out six or seven tracks without losing any of its impact.

I often end my reviews by saying that I want to dive into a band's previous albums. Usually that's because I enjoyed myself enough to just want more. On this occasion, it's to find out how Crematory's sound evolved because I have a feeling I'm going to like them more a few albums ago.

Noir Reva - Continuance (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
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I still don't have a firm grasp on what post-rock is, beyond the fundamental idea of creating soundscapes with traditional rock instruments, but I love a lot of what I'm hearing. Case in point: Noir Reva, a post-rock band who hail from Koblenz in Germany. They sound like they play electronic music but I'm reasonably sure that, if there are any actual keyboards in use here (surely the intro to They Do Exist proves that there are), they really aren't doing anywhere as near as much as we might think.

While Fiowia and Skyward open up proceedings with major emphasis, the quiet parts mostly serving as an underline to the more overt ones, this album does settle down as it goes until it's a sort of upbeat jangly ambience for quite a while, but with depth to it like all the best electronic music. Fiowia is the most overt rock song here with Skyward the most contrasted, its peaceful midsection leading into an agreeably dark conclusion.

My favourite song is easily Goraiko, which starts out much like it could be an instrumental post-rock cover of a wildly famous pop song I've never heard before. It grows and evolves as it goes, out of a vague sense of familiarity and into a voyage of discovery. The cover art fits this song because I could imagine starting it on those steps where I might have chatted with no end of people for years but ending it somewhere on the other side of those trees, where I've never previously been but which I'm better for now having visited.

While much of this album, as with much post-rock, could be the soundtrack to an imaginary film or book or video game, the most perky sections, like the beginning to Goraiko, sound rather like a better version of what we hear on YouTube compilations of fantastic football goals. I usually put those videos on mute because I don't want their generic and unimaginitive scores when I want commentary but I'd certainly leave the sound on if music like this was used instead, because it's far from generic and it's full of imagination.

While parts of this would work on videos like that, much of the album would not because it doesn't stay perky and upbeat. Come Back Apollo has darkness woven throughout, the jangling becoming somewhat melancholy. I don't know if Apollo ever plans to come back but, from the tone of this song, I doubt the band believe he will. I'm not sure what the subject matter of They Do Exist is but it's menacing enough in the midsection to count as the discovery of a suppressed alien invasion.

It's songs like They Do Exist that really highlight what post-rock does, as it could have been created entirely using synths but I'm assuming that that isn't a drum machine and those are guitars and a bass. It's an odd idea, to conjure up electronica-esque soundscapes with traditional rock instruments, but I'm really digging it and Noir Reva sound very good to me, soothing but with an underlying sense of menace.

There seem to be four gentlemen in the band, but I can't find details of the roles they play, beyond being songwriters. The other key information that I can provide is that this appears to be their second album, after a 2016 full length called Nuance, a title that could easily have been applied here too. It was a little shorter and the songs on it were a little shorter too, but I would like to hear it to see how the band have progressed.

Vulcano - Eye in Hell (2020)

Country: Brazil
Style: Death/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
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If I mention Brazil in conjunction with extreme metal, most of you are going to think Sepultura, but they weren't the only band doing that sort of thing in the early days because there was a major scene growing there back in the early eighties. Other pioneers included Dorsal Atlântica, Sarcófago and this band, Vulcano, who were formed in São Paulo in 1980 as Astaroth, changing to Vulcano the following year. They found their style in 1984, playing a hybrid of black, death and thrash metal that still feels proto-extreme today three and a half decades on.

While they only split up for five years in the early nineties, this is only their eleventh album, their first since 2016's confusingly titled XIV. It's good old-fashioned extreme metal, reminding often of early Slayer and Celtic Frost, which is no bad mix, especially when you add in some Teutonic thrash. I haven't heard Vulcano in a long while, so I'm out of date in what they've been doing. I'm not seeing great ratings on their last few albums but this certainly seems decent to me.

It's far from the most original album I've ever heard, but there's a hunger in the sound that I really like and an excellent production job that renders an almost live in my office feel. I really like that too and a blisterer of an opener like Bride of Satan to kick things off in old school Slayer style doesn't hurt either. Neither does the Teutonic vocals on Cursed Babylon. It all starts out great, with decent riffs, strong churns and excellent solos.

Its biggest problem is that it isn't particularly varied and, even where it is, the album's structure prevents us from seeing that in any big picture. A pairing of Evil Empire with its slower mantra-like Celtic Frost guitars and the up tempo Struggling Besides Satan with its frantic vocals that struggle to keep up with the music is worthy variety, but that's about it. We get the same sort of pairings throughout the album and not much else. Most of these songs are variations on the same styles.

Its biggest success is that the raw and live sound feels great and none of the songs outstay their welcome. Sure, part of that is because they're all short, with only one of thirteen tracks making it past the four minute mark and five of them lasting less than three. That makes this a real blitzkrieg release, one that ramps up early and sustains at least one of a holy trinity of speed, heaviness and intensity throughout, if not more than one at once.

What all that boils down to is that, if you're into that old school extreme sound but want to hear it recorded in a studio with modern technology, this is a great choice. We can even hear the bass, especially within songs like Dealer of My Curses, where it gets its own moment in the spotlight, or with songs like Inferno, where it rumbles along gloriously underneath everything else.

However, it doesn't deliver anything that you haven't heard before, making this more of a completist purchase for the diehards than a discovery moment for the curious. Now, if the latter do find it and love it, that's fantastic and it'll work well as a starting point for an exploration of the genre. The more discovery that curious listener does, though, the more this will vanish into the background.

This is one of those albums I'll give a 7/10 for being thoroughly enjoyable in a style that I love but should drop a point for people who don't share a passion for this sort of thing.

Aridonia - Aridonia (2020)

Country: Argentina
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Feb 2020
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I love how flexible genres can be nowadays. Case in point: how can we place a band like Aridonia into just one pigeonhole? Quick answer: we can't. Just listening to the first track on this, their debut album, I hear it drifting through half a dozen different genres, though the flow is entirely natural.

It's Abismos and it starts out as a soothing, hypnotic and psychedelic rock song. When the fuzzy guitars join in and the vocals get more raucous, we're firmly in stoner rock territory. Then we get all prog with intricate changes and even an ethnic section. The bass of Tomas Longombardo gets some welcome runs during the middle of the song. And the end slows down considerably and heavies up, with a nod towards doom or sludge metal.

I don't know if there's a particular lyrical vision behind the song because Aridonia are from Argentina and sing in Spanish. Google Translate isn't much of a help on this, perhaps because the lyrics are abstract or colloquial. It looks like they're talking about a journey through time and past lives, but I visualised it as a trip down into the depths of the ocean, Abismos meaning Abysses, with the colour of the song representing the weird and wonderful at serious depths and the heaviness representing the weight of the water.

Fantasmagoria is an odd follow-up because the otherworldly images I conjured up from the opener continue but it kicks off with a riff that's reminiscent of Metallica's Frantic, of all things. While Robert Trujillo would leap into bass runs like Longombardo gets here, the rest of that band have become part of the mainstream and we can only attempt to imagine them doing something as interesting as this.

I won't be much of a surprise for a band who delve into both psych and prog, but Fantasmagoria is the shortest song here and it's still over five minutes in length. Abismos is the longest at over nine and it doesn't feel remotely too long. These songs are as long as they need to be and no longer, even at seven or eight minutes.

With the band tight and constantly interesting, the weak spot for me is the vocals which aren't bad but are rough and would fit better on a dirty blues album. The singer is Fernando Echenique, who is also one of two guitarists, so I'd bet money that he thinks of himself as a guitarist who also sings not a singer who also plays. Oddly, when the band get closest to dirty blues, as they do at points on La serpiente y la manzana, he doesn't sing much, though he fits perfectly when he does.

Echenique's voice brings a down to earth garage rock sound to the band which would otherwise seem trippier and more detached from reality. This is music to accompany you during astral travel or on some sort of heroic psychedelic trip. It's often dark but it's always warm, so it's an interesting companion rather than a dangerous one. Its presence is comforting but it does too many imaginative things for us to relax, so we can't and don't want to ignore it. It's almost like a conversation, though I have no idea what I'm contributing to that.

I don't think anything here approaches the majesty of Abismos, but this is a rather immersive album, enough so that I listened three or four times before putting virtual pen to paper. It's easy to get lost in the second half, with Magia negra particularly magnetic but that feeling continuing on through Oda a la memoria and Leviatán for a twenty minute chunk of solid trip.

I should add that I only have a little Spanish, but I could figure out all these song titles without online help (except for one, "manzana", which is "apple", so meaning that La serpiente y la manzana is presumably Biblical). The only bit I'm stuck on is what Aridonia means, because I'm not seeing a reference or a translation, so maybe they just made it up.