Customer Reviews

Pagano

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Puerto Rico's Dantesco have a sound that is really easy to describe: think something along the lines of early Candlemass crossed with Manilla Road or Manowar.
While the music in this album is impeccably built around that style and can be very appealing to American power metal fans, it has its fair share of problems: much like Manowar, it can be very over the top at times, crossing that fine line that separates bona fide metal anthems from lame self parody. Just like Messiah Marcolin, the band's singer, Erico "la bestia" relies on an operatic, vibrato heavy singing style that is an acquired taste and can be very off putting, even for power metal fans, and finally, almost all the lyrics are sung in Spanish, which can be a big turn off to a lot of listeners.
Now, being a native Spanish speaker, I don't share the prejudices most English speakers have against music sung in other languages, but the truth is that it's really hard to pull off heavy metal (or rock, for that matter) singing in Spanish convincingly. From a phonetic point of view, compared against English, Spanish is very inflexible: it has only five vocalic sounds, to many hard consonants and most of the words are on the three and four syllable range... geopolitical considerations aside, there is a reason why English is still the international language for pop music and that's because singing in said language does sound easier on western (and in some cases, eastern) ears than most languages.
So, even if the singing in this album is not as disastrous as it could be, I'm convinced that this band would sound a lot better if they sung in English. The European edition includes two bonus tracks, and one of them (It Came from Hell) is sung in English, which kind of confirms my hypothesis. Epic and power metal fans will find this band enjoyable as long as they don't mind the Spanish singing.