Rating: 8.0

Country: Mexico/USA

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: American Line

Track list:
1.Espejo Que Humea
2.El Gran Sacrificio De Quetzalcoalt
3.Aztlan
4.A Batalla Vamos
5.Códices
6.Resistencia Itzae
7.Sexto Sol Aún Naciendo
8.Sangre De Vida
9.Guerra Indígena
10.Fuego Rebelde
11.Anenécuilco: Semillas De Rebelion
12.Nuevo Sol De Teotihuacan
13.Caída Del Aguíla


Band Website: Yaotl Mictlan

Yaotl Mictlan - Guerreros De La Tierra De Los Muertos

Yaotl: Drums, percussion, samples
Tlatecatl (Desecrator): Guitar, vocals
Xolotl: Guitars
Ak'Ben: Bass
Ocelotl: Indigenous instruments

Well, there goes any chance of me discussing this band at gigs. It would take half an hour just to tell anyone how the name is spelled, let alone pronounced. Good thing this CD sells itself not on an easily spoken band name, but on the basis of being one of the freshest, most interesting black metal discs i've heard for bloody ages.

Yaotl Mictlan's basic idea is to meld oldschool black metal violence with Aztec mythology and flashes of varied instrumentation. Somewhat like a Mexican Nokturnal Mortum, except the fusion is far more seamless. This long CD - all 70 minutes of it - proceeds at a mostly relaxed pace, occasionally exploding into flurries of blasting or dropping into ambient territory. The riffs here are primarily melodic scales with some tasteful use of tremolo, backed up by furiously active drumming and subtle bass presence. There's also a bit of spanish guitar to be heard, as you'd expect from this sort of thing. There's also snippets of rattling percussion and epic acoustic passages, so the entire hour-plus isn't just spent bashing the listener's brains in. This is a highly eclectic album which easily holds my attention for the entire duration, which in this age of filler-riddled discs is no mean feat. The final track starts out sounding like some sort of sacrificial ritual, before the metal kicks it at the 3-minute mark to create some seriously epic atmosphere. The excellent production doesn't hurt either - everything is perfectly mixed, but never polished further than it needs to be. It's a raw, yet extremely powerful sound which seriously sets Yaotl Mictlan apart from most bands playing this style.

Lyrically I have no idea what they're saying since the entire disc is rasped in the band's native language, but they provided a helpful translation - rough, but accurate enough to get the point across. Mostly it's Aztec and Mayan mythology mixed with antichristian black metal nastiness, as expected. The end result is that the vocals sound insanely vicious, like early Impaled Nazarene if they'd been Mexican and not Finnish. If you can find this, don't hesitate to pick it up before it vanishes into obscurity and becomes an impossible-to-locate classic.

July 16th, 2007