Bandcamp “No overdubs, no quantization, just the band playing live, all at once.” That is the band’s own description of how this record was made, and they finish the thought by saying they wanted the feeling of four people in a room pushing their amps to the limit rather than anything approaching perfection. Most bands who say this mean it as a mood. Cadáver de Cabra mean it as a constraint, and the whole album has to be judged against what that constraint gives and what it costs.
What it gives is weight that cannot be assembled afterwards. “SATAN BLUES” is the clearest evidence: a slow, warm, unhurried thing where the drums have room around them, the kick works on body rather than click, and the cymbals decay into the room instead of being cut off. Nothing here has been flattened to compete on volume, so when the riff finally lands it lands from somewhere. “CHEDDAR BRAIN” closes the record the same way, breaking its own wall apart with acoustic and spoken passages that would be pointless on a louder master and are the best moments on the album on this one. Eight minutes for the title track, seven and a half for the closer, and neither feels padded, because a band playing together in real time cannot fake a build.
What it costs is separation. Below the fuzz, the bass and the guitars occupy the same ground almost everywhere, and in the fastest sections of “CADAVER DE CABRA” the notes stop being individually legible and become a single moving mass. Whether that is a fault depends on which Madrid you think this band comes from. The stated reference points are Electric Wizard, Weedeater, Eyehategod and Sourvein, and none of those bands ever wanted you to hear the individual notes either. The harder problem is the voice. It sits inside the band rather than over it, with room reverb on it, and on three of these six songs the words simply do not survive the mix. For a record with song titles this specific, that is a loss rather than an atmosphere.
The range is the surprise. “NO RULES ONLY SLUDGE” opens with a spoken intro and then runs as the tightest and most airless thing here, and “KETAMINE ZOMBIE” moves through thrash tempos into a long melodic lead section that nothing on the tracklist prepares you for. Then “AQUELARRE” spends eight and a half minutes on a genuine post-black structure, clean delayed intro, blast eruption, ambient outro, with the harsh vocal buried as texture rather than sung as a line. Six songs, and no two of them share a template. That is either a band with a lot in them or a band that has not chosen yet, and after one album from Madrid it is too early to say which.
The bet they have made is a good one and the record mostly wins it. A cleaner version of these songs would be a worse album. It would also be one where you could hear what the singer is saying, and there is a version of this band that gets both.
The clearest thing about this record is how differently the six tracks sit. The opener is dense and pressed, with very little air left around the cymbals, while everything from the third track onward opens up considerably: drums with real room on them, a snare with wood in the sound, cymbals allowed to ring out, and quiet passages that stay quiet. Guitars are heavily saturated throughout with the low end carried jointly by fuzz and a bass that rarely steps out as its own voice, and in the fastest passages the two merge into one mass where individual notes stop being readable. The vocal is placed inside the band with room reverb rather than on top of it, which suits the atmosphere and costs intelligibility on several songs. The recurring technical point is a build-up around the lower middle at full density, which slightly smothers the kick in the heaviest moments. Given the band recorded this live in a room with no overdubs, most of that reads as the honest price of the method rather than an error in the mix.
Standout tracks: SATAN BLUES, AQUELARRE, CHEDDAR BRAIN
