It is true that Horda strives to play some complex and almost progressive heavy metal, but betting all of their efforts into personal technical abilities is the wrong way to write and album that has a big amount of talent but that makes no sense.
Everything around “Más Allá de la Muerte” is written and distributed so that the very talented Gerson Antezana can deliver a nice guitar clinic, leaving a side any attempt to actually create songs and write lyrics; only 5 tracks on the album have lyrics actually they are 4 since the intro track is just a background grunt. Let me be specific Antezana is an amazing guitar player, his solos, the rhythms he creates are quite outstanding, they sound like a much younger and inexperienced Stéphan Forté (Adagio), but his guitar on its own cant carry the entire band all the way, I mean I don’t even know why they have a singer if he is only included in 4 songs.
“Entre el Bien y el Mal” is your typical “Latin” heavy metal song, with a bad production and that very forced way to place the vocals into the song, I don’t know why but many, many Latin heavy metal bands have that problem, they just cram the lyrics ruining the melodies most of the songs are starting to develop. “Génesis” and “Lágrimas del Cielo” are instrumental tracks that really set a tone that should not be there, once you reach the title track “Más Allá de la Muerte” you expect a prolong guitar lesson and Horda switches back to a very simple heavy metal, and to this now after two extremely guitar fantasy guided songs is very confusing, because they end up sounding way out of place, yes the song at the end brings the “flare” of Mr Antezana back, but its kind of weird that he can only play at all his potential when the rest of the band is in the background instead of blending his talent within the rest of the band.
“Sitsinleven” gives a chance for Eduardo Oviedo to have his 1:25 minutes of glory, he is a very solid bass player, Horda sounds like a band with extremely talented musicians, but they lack the capacity to blend their talents into an album or even for a song and when they do, they can’t perform at their best level, “Más Allá de la Muerte” is a bad album written by great musicians, lets hope they can find a way to put all of their ideas and abilities into something that can show not only how good they are as individuals but that they can work with one another.
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