Corridos de muerte

It's a well disappointing scenario when an album shows off a promising sound, only to barely deliver on its potential. We're given a super thick Cazares guitar tone, as accurate as on Fear Factory but more organic sounding. We're given an excellently tight and clean blast beat that supplies a lot of power as the snare and kick are obviously compressed for the attack to bust through the guitars and come up to the front of the mix, but not so compressed they sound two-dimensional and smothered. Finally, the vocals from Tony Campos (Static-X) are surprisingly good given how he'd generally been known as a backup but does more than a serviceable job on lead vocals here with a good back and forth between the lower standard verse stuff and those abrasive, controlled highs.

So the motor was there. The album needed material on par with that high-octane setup. Instead of delivering on that, Dino and the boys opted for a good fun ethos of making a few training session grade riffs and tossing them together and working their way through an entire album with that mindset. It sounds good on the whole, dynamic and highly energetic, but there's just that problem the songs barely make it past the status of generic. There's also a sort of dumping ground mentality at work in this. For example 'Despedazando Muertos' just jams a Cannibal Corpse riff randomly, just because they had room and that's what came up that time. The emphasis is really on making an album with blast beats and angry vocals in Spanish, and little ambition finds its way into the project.

Like, the starter track 'Asesino' can feel like an excuse to yell out "Asesinooooooo!!!" a bunch of times. To sound tough, or, something. Albeit, on a pretty good riff. However, there's a redeeming quality here: 'Sequestro Nuestro' is the antidote to the prevailing dullness and low-effort festive hubris. It's got true identity, a genuinely dark main theme that was not only very well thought out but also well utilized as Cazares introduces it first in those ominous, bloated clean guitar plucks before the song delivers the massive blow to the listener of switching instantaneously to the blast beat led, high gain tremolo picked version of it. All of a sudden, the music turns immediately recognizable instead of remote, and genuinely intriguing. The chorus goes hard as fuck: "(low growl) Sequestro ... (scream) Nues-troooooooo!", and the band finally supplies the dark twist and atmosphere that feel a whole lot more like what this album was apparently wanting to be, looking at the cover, band name, titles and musical style. 'La Ejecucion' provides another similar theme, close in dark ambiance.