Taking their name from the poison used on arrowheads by South American tribes, Curare have been around for almost a decade, playing adventurous and quirky metal that has become extremely popular south of the border, so popular in fact that it's surprising that these guys aren't better known here in the U.S. In their home country of Ecuador, Curare have been part of large scale rock festivals, have received massive amounts of radio play in their region, and have even been included on film soundtracks, but their genre-hopping thrash has yet to become known up here in the states. For their 2006 album Radical Accion, which has just been reissued by Mexican death/grind label American Line, Curare enlisted the services of Faith No More's Billy Gould to master the album, and that hints at where Curare draw at least some of their influences from. Thrash metal and hardcore punk are combined for the bulk of their sound, but Curare engage in some energetic genre mashup and quirky songwriting that suggests that Faith No More (and maybe to a lesser extent Mr Bungle) are a big influence on their music. They bring together fusion-y psychedelia and chunky thrash metal on tracks like "Nucanchi Llacta Rebelion", or the insanely funky hand drums, metallic groove and Andean flutes of "Creo En Mis Huacas (El Penko)", while "Revolusiembra" goes from melodic croon to rapid-fire hardcore to Santana-esque jazz/rock. One things for sure, these guys know how to play. Aside from the Andean flutes, some of the other uniquely Ecuadorian instruments that are used on the album include the rondador, a kind of South American pan-pipe, hand-drums, and another kind of oversized pan-pipe called a zampo�as, all of which give Radical Accion it's unique flavor. All kinds of stuff is thrown together in here, and it'll definitely take an adventurous set of ears to dig Curare's schizoid blend of hard rock, Latin jazz-rock, Ecuadorian folk instruments, thrash metal and hardcore, especially when the band suddenly launches into some straight-up rap metal (like on "Revolusiembra"). Yeah, I know, but somehow this band doesn't sound anywhere near as cheesy as you'd expect when this sort of stuff happens, possibly because of the ever-shifting nature of their music, and the way that Curare hurl themselves into it with real gusto. The music never gets boring, that's for sure! And for fans of the band, you might want to note that this reissue also includes a bunch of tracks from their out of print album Comando Urbano from 2004.