METALMUSICA - ALEACIONES ALEATORIAS

These days I rarely find the time to sit in front of a computer, unless I´m working on some sort of paper concerning cucumbers, and how men are falsely swayed by this elongated vegetable and the likes - all of them with the same recipes, but with different ingredients. At some point in time you get to the stage, where you actually question the looney-bin-freak-out-I´m-a-monkey mentality, almost everyone I know, is sage rated with, and whether this thing called higher education is indeed safe? (-This thing isn´t that is for damn sure...) When I DO get to sit down with ease, and I write a review, -I find it pretty natural to write about the album, I´ve been listening to the most, and very often it turns out to be a 5 star album...

Imagine a Mexican Gourishankar with the same out-of-the-bag approach as Area, and you´ve got Cabezas De Cera. If you like either of these groups you should be out the door.

I think a lot of new progressive bands gets whipped for lack of real identity, genuine musical personality, and a lot of the times rightfully so. Cabezas is something completely different. Their music is wild and jazzy at times only to swing around and sound like a psychedelic breakfast party complete with a grotesquely mad mariachi band on acid and a guy trying to dislodge his spleen through his saxophone. There are no templates - no safe bets. -This thing has been done before I know, and a lot of the new RIO groups tend to fall in the trap, where you play to play. The reasons behind the music has been deleted, only to be taken over by overtly weird and complex music just for the heck of it. I might have been over the moon for this kind of making music 10 years ago, but the fact of the matter is, you get bored with the feeling of no feel. Cabezas might change directions and often in bizarre ways you´d never expect, but you always have a presence of the mad Desperados lurking underneath. Picture the mariachi band from the movie Desperado, and you have my mental image of their musical roots, and how I thought they looked like, when I heard this at first. The impression hasn´t deterred. -The rhytm guitars and drums often give them away.

To give this a song by song slaughtering would be staggeringly cruel, and only for musicians who write lyrics in binary code. I put on the discs in succession and I listen, dance, jump like a crazy man reaching for the light switch for the sun. The music practically screams progressive, but the musicians here are so capable and in tune with each other, that the otherwise complex nature of the pieces seem to flow so eloquently and with such grace or pure primal emotion. Whatever this record sets out to do, it does it wholeheartedly, and that is part of, why it works this well. It feels together and mad at the same time, and I love it dearly for that.

You get 3 guys playing incredibly tight (mostly)wordless prog, that, I imagine, gave the collabs a mind boggling assignment when it came down to labelling this mother. Wuuuiiiiii! You get an almost incomprehensible coherence in the incoherence, which might be down to how well these guys know each other. In that sense, they remind me a bit of Amon Düül 2 and the way they were able to correlate their individual musical ideas during their first couple of albums. A wonderful sense of melody or maybe quite the opposite, but done at the right time.

I´ve been fuelled by an abnormal quench for saxophone these last two months, wasting a lot of my time listening to Bird and a good deal of canterbury, and this album is full of it! Extremely versatile and recalling David Jackson a good deal. Amazing lungs! This album is probably the greatest piece of Progressive music, I have heard in a very very long time. If you like the Eclectic genre - get this! If you like Canterbury - get this! If you like the Psychedelic genre - get this! If you like Experimental- Post - get this! If you like Fusion - then get this!

I hope my future journey with Cabezas De Cera will steer me through some more of this wonderful harnessed madness of scorchingly beautiful music. This album could, fairly I might add, have been called "The Whirlwind".

I was really blown away by this Mexican's band debut so I thought i'd check out their latest studio album "Metalmusica". It has a couple of negatives going against it right away for me. First of all it's a double album and second of all there are a lot of improvs here. I've experienced very few double albums that i've offered up 4 stars to,most bands can't put out over a 100 minutes of consistantly great music, and lets face it improvs are often hit and miss which is the case here. The music is very unique here with these strange instruments some of which are even homemade. So this is difficult music to describe or to know what's actually making the sounds. Some of this recording is so good that I hate to give 3 stars, but then we'll get music that I find repetitive and boring. This is very much a mixed bag for me sadly. I was hoping for something more like the debut.

Highlights are the opening track "Fundicion" with it's in your face distortion and dissonant sax. It turns spacey 4 1/2 minutes in. Amazing tune. "Indomble" just really clicks with me. I like the beat when it kicks in before a minute. "Ernadu" is almost East Indian sounding early on with lots of sax late. "Del Nois Al Nais" has a cool intro that is quite powerful. It turns spacey later with prominant sax. I like the bass after 6 minutes.

Obviously there are many fans of this double album if you check out the other reviews here. It's interesting enough that I would also suggest you check out this album. I just don't enjoy it that much. 3 stars.

I've had a hard time with the first two albums from this Mexican band. Their music is truly very difficult to apprehend. When I saw that their latest album to date was a double CD, I decided to review it in two times. I really can't listen to this type of work for about two hours. As such, I fully agree with Mellotron Storm: two CD's were just too much.

The same sort of musical experience than before is provided with "Metalmúsica" which is the title of the first CD. This album is a combo of powerful matters ("Fundición") with notable jazz accents as well as fine ethnic numbers ("Nocturno Incadecente" or "Kieri"). The latter style has by far my preference. There are also several tracks which sound as having no structure like "Armatoste" for instance. It seems as a juxtaposition of notes or sounds without any consistency. Some sort of free-jazz which is just loose and chaotic.

Repetitive and minimalism are also featured on the menu ("Milagro"). Actually, there are not many attractive parts on this work. The chaotic and noisy "Mutación" won't generate any better feeling, I'm afraid.

The first very good track from this all instrumental album is "Indomable". Folkish textures and a nice melody are very much welcome after all these noises and painful passages. Some relief is also felt during the acoustic "Destiempo". It is not that this track is great; it is just providing a halt in the whole maelstrom available so far.

The symphonic jazz oriented "Znjambre" is not too bad at all: it features some very good sax as well as enjoyable percussion work. It is one of the best tracks available so far. The second part of the closing number of disk one is also enjoyable thanks to some very nice flute parts.

In all this first disk is below average: two stars.

The second CD is no more than improvised and choatic music. Noisy with no structure all the way through. Iguess that the band should have better sit under the jazz-rock/fusion section. I have tried hard to enter into their musical mould, but this is beyond my capabilities.

If you like free-jazz, improvisation and loose music: this might be worth. I am not of that kind though. Two stars.