Los Mundos – Calor Central
Never afraid to explore the unbeaten path, the latest offering from Cardinal Fuzz first veers off into the dusty pueblos of Monterrey and then much deeper underground as Luis Ángel Martínez and Alejandro “Chivo” Elizondo’s latest as Los Mundos, Calor Central, is a concept album based on Jules Verne’s 1864 sci-fi epic A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
So committed to the project that it was partly recorded in an actual cave to simulate the start of the journey, the album is also the Mexicans’ heaviest to date, the crunching guitar and harsh snares of a track like “Apertura” hitting like a crushing landslide. Spoken-word parts lead passages toward the garage-psych exotica of a band like The Limiñanas, while elsewhere the vocal is so strongly reverbed that it hangs in suspension, kept buoyant by the ocean of distortion of below. It’s an atmospheric and effective trick, just as the snaking Eastern melodies in “Olas De Lava” are as the curl out of noxious underground gases.
Getting down to the meat of the story, nine full minutes are then dedicated to “Subterraneo Mar Jurasico” and its lost world of dinosaurs and man-like apes (or ape-like men?), musically a solid psych-fuzz groover that develops into marauding motorik and mesmeric guitar play before fading out to ambience that jars with the sudden rush of the protagonists’ volcanic ejection from the earth on the closing “La Salida”. As much an exploration of sound then as it one of scientific discovery, Calor Central is both food for the mind and the soul.
Best track: “Apertura”
~Calor Central is released 26th April 2019 via the collaborative efforts of Cardinal Fuzz and Little Cloud.~