If for some reason you were wondering how did the Colombian death metal scene evolved during the late 90’s and early 2000; this is the record for you.
14 re-mastered tracks from all of the band’s discography (a couple of covers as well) up to 2002 are packed in 15 años de Guerra (15 years of war). When this record came out the band was celebrating their 15th anniversary, so it just seem logical to call their first “Best of” album “15 years of war”.
This is Colombian death metal, quite nice actually, in many aspects similar to what death metal used to sound like for bands like Obituary and Death; mid tempo death with deep growls and sharp guitars.
The record starts with a very mellow intro in the song Verdun 1916, but after a couple of seconds, their brutality takes over and it sounds a little like Death, this song is in Spanish, something worthy of listening but for some reason the vocals don’t fit the riffs the way they are supposed to, still the guitars do a great job, sharp and precise. 15 años de Guerra has some English lyrics and some Spanish ones.
To describe 14 songs is just too long and I may bore some of you, so I’ll be just talking about the tracks that really got my attention.
Bautizados en Rencor sounds like a song Sepultura could have done for an album like Morbid Visions, a mix of death/thrash and some black metal, really nice, very underground sounding.
Open Wound, this is my favorite song of the album; I think there is a different singer on this track, because he’s vocals are deeper…well he sounds like a totally different singer, a better singer. Killer riffs, nice fast and mid tempo drums, really a nice death groove on this track.
Third Reich, the song starts with a nice bass solo, this one is more into thrash metal, but the death growls are there to give it a little extra push; again the “groove” on the song is quite catchy, and the vocals are great.
For some reason (and it could be, that they used different singers, for the Spanish tracks and for the English ones, I don’t know since what I have is just a promo cd without a lot of details about the album) the Spanish based songs sound totally different than the English ones, being this last ones better in sound and vocal performance.
