Santa Muerte

These guys are phenomenal. They've got influences from every conceivable kind of heavy, hard music. The vocalist is quite probably one of the best that I've ever heard, signed or not, with a phenomenal black metal scream, a solid death growl, a good generalized scream, and very solid, mellow clean vocals.

The guitar works is very heavy, thrashy material, Santa Muerte has a really good progressive sound with heavy riffs that would put Dying fetus to shame, solos are your typically squealing, soaring solos. There are nice hard rock influences riffs. Everything feels fresh, everything feels metal. The drums are pounding, could improve with an increase in speed, but otherwise just fine. The bass is growling in the background.

I'm not keeping this review short because these guys are unsigned (which I try not to do); I'm keeping it short for the sake of having more time to listen to it. Also with albums like this, you need to actually listen to understand how good they are, it isn't practical to describe this kind of thing with words. Kudos Santa Muerte, you have surpassed a level of quality 98% of signed guys can't. One comment, the recordings are really quiet, the quality is definitely beyond any standards I have for unsigned artists, but the volume needs to go up, i need my volume to be up about 5x higher than my typical listening levels to get the same effect on these recordings.

10/10

http://www.myspace.com/santamuertega