This album is a collection of songs that musically are on the listenable side of mediocre but are let down by poor vocals. It’s obvious they’re aspiring to being underground metal titans like the Melvins or High on Fire but they aren’t showing much promise. Ladrón is the sound of competent musicians capable of throwing together pretty good songs but lack the spark of excitement to set them apart from their peers.
I was heavily disappointed with this album on my first listen, the band’s name and the Manga vibes from the cover made me think this was going to be another great rock band from Japan but I was fooled. The band hail from California and they sound like many of California’s early '90s alt-rock bands. This is probably in no small part due to Helmet’s Page Hamilton production. While I am a fan of Helmet, considering their recent return to the studio gave such discouraging results I would be wary that Hamilton may be past his creative prime. The unimaginative take on heavy-ish rock on display here confirms my worries; it sounds like they simply went into the studio and told the engineer that they wanted to sound like Seattle, 1990. Songs like “In Virgo” or “The Hide” could have been from the cutting room floor of any American guitar band from 15 years ago.
The music isn’t bad; but too derivative for my tastes. Totimoshi aren’t as heavy as they like to think (at least not in the studio) but they are at least a change from the two beat per minute sludge and doom bands that have spread like wildfire over the last few years. There are a couple of tasteful, simple guitar licks dotted throughout the album (like the opening to “Viva Zapata”) and the riffs are straightforward and uncomplicated. I can at least appreciate them for the way they’re put together.
Antonio Aguilar can play guitar but his style of singing is awful. He sounds like someone with a good voice but trying far too hard to be distinctive. He tries to sound pained and menacing but it ends up sounds cartoonish. If he wasn’t as rough sounding I would probably stick this album on more often than I will. On “These Meanings” he doesn’t try to sound like snarling rock star and while his voice is quite pleasant, it’s a shame that this is the only track that he does this.
Ladrón is not a terrible album but it suffers from the fact that the music, although proficiently played, isn’t that interesting and the parts that are worth listening to tend to be obscured by singing that doesn’t fit with it. This could have been an album with the potential for mass appeal as it is very radio friendly but unfortunately it is too uninspired to stand above the crowd.
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