Hadez - Guerreros De La Muerte (1986)

I've found that I can pretty much get down with any metal band from Central or South America from the years 1980 to 1990. Lot of really batshit crazy material, the type of shit that only some combination of isolation and motivation can produce. I mentioned the Parabellum album in my first contribution to Illcon but they're hardly the whole picture. And while they may have been one of the more extreme examples (even the most extreme, depending on who you might ask), there were legions of other like-minded metalheads that pushed their music towards an extremity that's rarely been paralleled. A good example is Lima, Peru's Hadez.

And holy shit, the cojones on this fucking band. So the first song on the first demo they release is pretty much the riff from Pentagram's "Forever My Queen" note-for-note played at various speeds (a striking similarity the band may or may not have been aware of, as the Pentagram song, while initially recorded in 1973, didn't see a semi-official release until twenty years later).

That's their introduction to the world.

That.

Then the next song kicks off with a riff that's stolen fucking exactly from Hellhammer's "The Third Of The Storms". But in between what seems like stabs at blatant plagiarism, the band moves into a zone where they may be falling completely apart or they may be taking off onto some higher plane of musical reality. It's hard to tell which. They'll throw in a standard thrash riff, but then everybody just starts soloing. And I don't mean melodic solos either. It's like everybody (drums included) is trying to cop the whole atonal noisemaking thing Kerry King built a career upon.

It almost borders on free jazz sometimes, like an evil Caspar Brotzmann or something. I'd like to think they were trying to advance the art form with a sort of hyperspeed avant-garde plunderphonic approach, but in all likelihood they were just banging this shit out based on enthusiasm and adrenaline with little concern for trivial details like songs, musicianship, or recording quality. Apparently, Hadez is still around and has a good number of releases under their collective bullet belt, but honestly I don't want to hear them. Even though there was a release called Extreme Badness On The World, which rules, there's no way any of their subsequent albums could be as spot-on perfect as this.

Oh yeah, and this may be the only band that utilized a "Z" in an intentional misspelling and can get away with it.

That's saying a fucking lot.

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Hadez - Guerreros De La Muerte