DON BOLO — Bahamut (review)

DON BOLO — Bahamut album cover Album · 2022 · Avant-garde Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
siLLy puPPy
One of Ecuador’s most bold and adventurous bands, DON BOLO has emerged from the capital city of Quito with its strange concoction that fuses art punk with various strains of metal, jazz and what sounds like Mexican mariachi music! I loved it just from the description haha! Virtually unknown outside of South America, DON BOLO returns in 2022 with its latest BAHAMUT (clearly means “Bathomet”) after three years of waiting. See 2018’s “El Principio del Fin” and the 2017 EP “En Muerto.”

DON BOLO takes you for a ride in post-punk paradise with chunky punky guitar riffs that provide an ample dose of dripping attitude that’s in yer face like Sid Viscious on a bad day! The artsy aspects emerge in avant-prog off-kilter time signature deviations in an otherwise groovy sort of procession. Add some sultry sax squawking and the occasional references to Latin music and what you have here is a recipe that will stimulate and titillate the senses in a most peculiar way!

This procession of 13 tracks takes a bunch of atonal punk skronk sounds and mixes in disparate elements including doom metal and other metal styles into Latin punk rock fiesta! Lyrics are in Spanish however we get everything from spoken word to clean and normal and then off to screaming in aguish! Tracks tend to be on the shorter side in the vein of classic punk rock but offer strange embellishments. Tracks like the short “Naro Pacional” are straight out of the John Zorn playbook while “Nuevas Masculindades” borrows a fat bassy beat from reggaeton along with some surf rock and Special type of 2-Tone at times.

BAHAMUT runs the gamut of perfectly walking the tightrope act of balancing melodic accessibility with the more dissonant and angular aspects of prog and avant-metal without actually totally going too far in either of those directions. This is art punk dished out Latin American style but not amateurish like so many modern retro punkers tend to be. This is some serious stuff that keeps me engaged from beginning to end.

This was a great discovery! If nerdy avant-art-punk is your scene then you can’t go wrong with DON BOLO. Something about jazzy post-punk laced with disparate metal styles and Latin flavors really appeals to me and the diverse antics displayed on this album are refreshing. So far this is my favorite discovery of 2022. DON BOLO is Emilio Montenegro (bass), José Hernández (drums), Daniel Gachet (guitars), Pedro Naranjon (guitars), Luis Sigüenza (saxophones). Described as criminal punk jazz, i think i have found a new favorite band to latch onto!
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