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| Cover art from the painting "Day of Judgement" by Damian Michaels. |
With Rezando Al Miedo the four piece Venezuelan band Cultura Tres present their third full length album.
I know and love their first two albums La Cura (2008) and El Mal del Bien (2011) very much and so I decided to go to a Cultura Tres concert about two months ago, shortly before the release of Rezando Al Miedo. I expected to have an entertaining evening, what happened instead..., four guys on a stage worked their bewitching charm on me and turned a simple music club into a magical place and I needed quite a time to disentangle myself from the spell they had cast upon me (it still lingers a bit). Long story short: It was a fucking great show and the more I was on edge for the new album.
Of course you can’t really compare a recorded album with the experience of a live show, but to my surprise and joy on Rezando Al Miedo I hear a lot of this magic that was in the show - the magic of not only creating music with a huge amount of passion and emotion, but also getting it conveyed into the listener’s heart and soul. Running the risk of spoiling the bottom line, I say this is the true beauty and power of this album.
Eight well written songs with intricate multi-layered structures and an enormous dynamic range of quiet passages and thunderous doom riffs are the base and frame on which Cultura Tres build and which they fill with their pretty individual blend of Sludge, Doom, psychedelic Rock, Blues, South American Folk, even Post Rock elements, drone sounds and whatnot.
They have a unique kind of using bent, blue notes and dissonances to create a special sense of hypnotic creepiness and alienation. Excellent musicianship, including the incredibly variable vocals that are able to express every shade of mood of sorrow, separation, hate anger,...is another feature that contributes to make this album the brilliant gem it is. The lyrics (most in English, two in Spanish) revolve around the European colonialism of South America, religious oppression, social indifference and selfishness.
And again, to retrieve the bottom line, the most intriguing thing about Rezando Al Miedo is the spellbinding emotional impact, embedded in the individual style, the tightly written songs and the band’s musical skills. I don’t know, but Culura Tres must have a special incantation that melts it all down into this breathtaking masterpiece.
[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]
