��� First got turned on to the 1984 album Kuman after reading about it on Aesop Dekker's killer blog Cosmic Hearse a few years ago, which sang high praises to this completely bonkers rock opera from obscure Mexican heavy metal band Cristal y Acero. But even his enthusiastic description didn't prepare me for just how badly this record fried my brain, my circuits overloaded by the band's brilliantly scatterbrained heavy metal-fueled Spanish-language rock opera, and even moreso when I finally got around to finding actual footage of the live performance online. Jesus! Can't say I've seen or heard anything quite it's equal - Kaman comes across as a musical version of an Edgar Rice Burroughs-esque pulp sci-fi fantasy dreamt up in the heat of an angel dust-inflamed delirium, where scenes of swordplay, cosmic intrigue and excessive infant-licking are set to a pounding score comprised of ripping metal licks, Broadway-style balladry, bluesy piano-draped soft rock, Chuck Berry-esque rock n' roll, smatterings of prog and 50's style doo-wop, and brief forays into bleary Tropic�lia, all smeared in unsophisticated synth effects and tinny backing keyboards. Wild shit, for sure - if you think you can handle it, you can see some footage of the stage production here. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

��� The ambition and creativity and unabashed weirdness on display throughout Kuman certainly gets my heart all aflutter, but I also genuinely dug the music from Cristal y Acero; sure, their ambition far outstrips their skill level, especially when it comes to tying together all of the disparate musical styles that they toss into this wild score, but the killer vintage Priest / Rainbow / Accept-influenced power-crunch that dominates the album is delivered with so much grimy gusto that I just can't resist, situated alongside the often ridiculously catchy outbursts of bombastic girl-pop (often sung by Mexican kid-pop superstar Tatiana, who also played one of the leads in the musical) or bursts of whacked-out thrift-store psychedelia that come from out of nowhere. Some of the other reviews of the album I've read have drawn comparisons to a zonked-out heavy metal version of a Meatloaf production, which makes sense, but the overall vibe is far weirder than even that suggests. If you don't already have a taste for the distinctly primal, pungent flavor of 80's era Mexican heavy metal, I seriously doubt that this is the album that would win you over, but fans of genuinely oddball old-school metal should definitely check this out. This recent CD reissue also contains the band's equally ripping self titled LP from 1983, which features a more traditional, straight-forward heavy metal sound sung in a mixture of English and Spanish, though even these songs are not without their moments of offbeat poppiness. The whole thing sounds like something that Ektro would have had a hand in reissuing, if that gives you any indication of what kind of stuff we're talking about. Comes in a full-color sleeve illustrated with some spectacularly cheesy sub-Frazetta fantasy action.