Aztlan - Legión Mexica review
Band: | Aztlan |
Album: | Legión Mexica |
Style: | Melodic death metal, Folk metal |
Release date: | January 2021 |
01. Sangre Por Sangre
02. La Raza
03. Raíces
04. Ritual
05. Legión Mexica
06. Día De Muertos
07. Colibrí Del Sur
08. Tlalocan
09. Mictlán
How do you reconcile folk metal's increasing need for some innovation with how Latin American bands had a growing tendency to showcase their cultural roots? Easy: Aztlan.
Aztlan are a Mexican (if that wasn't obvious from the album title) band, and even though I'm not precisely sure how many people are in the band, my estimates from what I've gathered from pics is between 6 and 9 (no pun intended). So this Mayan/Aztec/Olmec Slipknot* is performing a mix of Mexican folk music and metal, and they thankfully have mostly the lineup in common with Slipknot. I do not speak Spanish so I do not know exactly how edgy the lyrics are, but as far as the music goes, both the metal parts, the folk parts, and how they integrate, is pretty damn great.
I mentioned the "metal" parts and the "folk" parts, but I think that's not a useful way of looking at things, due to how inseparable Aztlan make them to be here. The vocals are the most obviously metal part of the sound, sitting pretty comfortably on the raspier death metal sides of things, with backing vocals that sometimes accentuate their impact, but never really diverging much from what you could hear in a thrashy death metal band. But other than that, the most usual elements of a metal band: the distorted guitars, the pounding bass, the blasting drums? They're the exception not the rule.
For the most part, the instrumentation is a very maximalist wall-of-sound of acoustic folk elements who capture the power of what would usually be a metal rhythm section through sheer quantity of sound. Think of Botanist or Kaatayra in terms of using acoustic folk as metal instrumentation. Sure, electric guitars and the like do appear sporadically through Legion Mexica, but either it's a guitar solo taking the lead, or it's only there to enforce the folk melodies. And as far as melodies are concerned, this thing is pretty melodious with a lot of dynamic songwriting despite lots of it following a lot of death/thrash tropes. Which is a pretty welcome change from all the war metal stuff that has become the norm for Latin American (especially Mexican) blends of extreme metal and folk, in the wake of movements like Crepusculo Negro.
Of course, I can't not mention that Legion Mexica, just like Aztlan's debut from 2019, Mexico Immortal, is really fucking long, at a few seconds shy of being 80 minutes. Does Legion Mexica have enough worthwhile material for 80 continuous minutes? No. Does it do a better job at it than its predecessor? Absolutely. So I think they got the sound just about right, and now they only need to focus on packaging it a bit more compactly, and also to take their finger off the "Caps Lock" button.
*Mr. Doctor came up with this joke and asked for credits. I delivered.
| Written on 17.01.2021 by Doesn't matter that much to me if you agree with me, as long as you checked the album out. |
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