Invocando al Diablo

Man, what a strange experience listening to this CD was; a strongly Sarcófago/Beherit/Blasphemy-influenced demo from a band hailing from a city called Jujuy, on the far northern border of the country........ from 1995 ! I mean, it rarely gets any earlier or more seminal than this for that local scene as far as I know.

After a slow, long. grinding intro full of tribal-like drumming, lowly-mixed-in, slow guitar riffing, insane laughter, and demonic invocations of all sorts (in incomprehensible Spanish), the second song abruptly assaults your eardrums with frantic, pounding drums, ear-slicing guitars, a nicely audible bass guitar (a rare ocurrence in BM) played with conventional tuning and sound, and a vocalist who mostly growls and gruffs in a low pitch, but occasionally ventures into high-pitch territory without ever resorting to shrieking.

The thing is, NOTHING is conventional here, or attempts at any kind of structure. Forget about tapping your feet at the rhythm section; while the bassist does seem skilled enough to play along the chaotic drumming, and the guitarist totally shreds with his chaotic, jagged riffing -not all that different from Japanese hardcore crust ones, both tonally and structurally, the drummer keeps pounding away at his kit in a manner than I can only describe as local carnival street band (which comes from African tribal drumming). Think it does not work ? Think again ! It annihilites ! As a result of this apparent lack of coherence,there is little repetitiveness to every song, and no two of them sound similar to one another, which is a huge plus in my opinion.

The resulting music is raw, brutal and primal as fuck, with relentless, trebley guitar riffing, sparse but effective, mosquito-like, short bursts of tremolo picking. The lyrics are viciously anti-christian and pay homage to the devil at every opportunity, yet the result is more in line with first wave BM than it is with anything contemporary. I did like the CD a lot, despite its clocking in at a meager 32'. I attribute this to the songs being so long and engaging; they just make time fly.

This was originally released on cassette alone, no CD or LP, back in '95. The Rulosupay CD release of it is nothing short of perfect; from the awesome packaging and artwork -the booklet unfolds into a poster six times the size of the cover on one side, portraying the band in full corpsepaint, and a history of the band with abundant pics, flyers and lyrics to all of the songs on the other, printed on thick glossy paper- to the perfectly mixed music on the CD.

Calling this a demo is a total understatement, for it was pristinely captured in 16 channels at a pro studio; the mix is so fucking good I was able to play it flat through my floorstander speakers without tonal correction or signal processing of any kind, with killer sound. I didn't even have to vary the volume from one song to the other as is so usual; kudos to all who were involved in releasing this beauty !

In the guise of bonus tracks, there's a live gig captured with what sounds as if someone had brought their walkman to the gig; totally not worth a listen. Guess they wanted to round out what seemed like too short a record; unnecessary by all means.

Now, do I consider this CD an essential purchase ? Maybe not for every BM fan out there, but for someone wanting a strong fix of atypical south American BM brutality, it will make a worthy addition to their collections, as it was for mine.