Review Summary: Hope is so close.....yet so far.
I don’t know about y’all, but I absolutely LOVE when bands incorporate native folk music from their homeland into their music. It adds a heightened sense of authenticity into whatever style of music that band/artists decides to make. Tzompantli is a band that is from California (WHOOPIE), they consist of members that are mainly of Mexican and/or Asian descent and their debut album
Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force is a monstrous death/doom assault, but it’s also much more than that.
The way this band blends the sheer brutality of death metal, the slow and torturous build ups of funeral doom and all of the different folk instruments not only gives this album tons of variation, it also shows an immense appreciation of their heritages while pounding the listener’s skull in with a blunt object. Riff upon gloomy doomy riff will fall upon your noggin like Thor’s hammer when it crashes into his enemies. The production job is perfect and keeps alive the grimey spirit of 90s death/doom that bands like Incantation and Autopsy perfected all those years ago. The implementation of the folk instruments is seamless and they bring a feeling of a faraway land that is never quite reachable because the riffs keep pulling you back into the eye of the hurricane. Guttural gurgles will cry out to you from the middle of the storm, echoing like a painful cry for help that has no hope of being answered.
Tzompantli has given us YET ANOTHER death metal banger in 2024. It’s the year of death that just keeps on giving.
Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force is bound to get lost in the shuffle among the Ulcerate’s and Funebrarum’s and Hyperdontia’s of the world. With so many great death metal albums, it’s hard to imagine people being able to keep up. But let me plead with you to NOT let this album go by the wayside. It is a unique take on the death metal genre and while it may not end up being the best death metal album released this year, it certainly deserves a spot in every death metal fan’s reppetoir.
