En vida

This great live album was released in 1997 on tape and CD via the DBN label. My first contact with this was in tape at the end of the nineties, that god knows where is it now.

This album contains songs from the two previous full lengths (and some covers here and there) recorded live, along several cities and towns of Argentina, with Walter Martinez on drums. He was not indeed the best drummer Almafuerte had but, compared with the current and rather slow, his work may be remembered as pretty good. In fact, the drum department will slowly start to be the most deficient in the next albums reaching the worst level with the nowadays Bin Valencia's lifeless and slow drumming.

The album’s start is a great speed metal song "De los Pagos del Tiempo" ("Of the Meads of Time") with lyrics by José Larralde, the great Argentine poet and leading figure in the (true) national folklore with seventy-three years behind his back. The vein is outlined in the album with that song. Most songs here are in the approach of the classical speed/heavy metal.
Advancing a little there’s a great cover: a heavy song with lyrics of a tango called "Desencuentro"; pretty nice stuff indeed. A nice double pedal bass-drum is heard in the following songs, "Buitres" ("Vultures") and "Por Nacer" (some sort of "To born")--hymns that nowadays seem forgotten for this band (considering their last live performances that exclude all these old songs). I must add here that the following cover song "Mal Bicho", of the retarded and populist cumbia/pop/rock band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, re-transformed into heavy metal was pretty damn annoying and kills the great mood left mainly by those two hymns mentioned earlier.

Advancing more than half of the album is seen a certain presence of folk songs on acoustic guitars as "Moraleja" or the very good "Zamba de Resurreccion", with a great tango in-between: "Ayer deseo, hoy realidad", originally a traditional heavy metal song of Hermetica now transformed pretty well into a tango. The live part of the album ends with "Dijo el droguero al drogador", one of the two or three Almafuerte’s most heavy songs that are around with a strong presence of double-bass drums and two or three great solos in the same song. The next two songs are studio outtakes and are there mainly as bonus tracks. The last one is quite interesting and it’s somewhat reminiscent of Motörhead, in a very good way.

The lyrics need mention since are clearly audible, and they’re very good, sometimes brilliant in their reflections and use of several figures, dealing with life struggles to Argentinean patriotism--an aspect that in this band will be accentuated with time, and pretty well, fortunately. It's clear that an important part of the appeal is lost for those who don't understand Spanish but the music is still powerful anyways.

This work is an excellent compilation of songs that they almost don't play live by these last years and, of course, deserved being released in an album. Personally I am not very keen of live albums, but this one is very good, clearly mandatory for fans of Almafuerte and also for others fans of speed/heavy metal. In addition, I'm not giving it a perfect score just because, like I said previously, I found the cover "Mal Bicho" uninteresting and almost of bad taste.