Short Reviews [North Of South - 2019 - "The Dogma and The Outsider"]

I get sent a lot of material to review, and have to be picky about what I decide to grab as I have a personal rule that if I take something to review then I review it, whatever I think of it. This means I need to be careful about flooding myself with new material, but when I saw the cover art for this album, I was somewhat intrigued. I mean, a polar bear cuddling a human? That album was sent to me by a label I hadn’t previously come across, and then a while later I was contacted by Spanish multi-instrumentalist Chechu Nos asking if maybe I would like to review his new EP? I was even more intrigued when he described the music to me as Prog Metal spiced with influences of quite different genres such as jazz, extreme metal, pop, Latin and even Flamenco. Now that is unusual, but now having played it I can see exactly what it means, and it is certainly as good a description as any. This is music which moves rapidly between different songs and there are times when it sounds almost like a different band. I am not a fan of the drum sound or playing, but putting that to one side this is a very interesting romp indeed, although it does come across as the work of a multi-instrumentalist as opposed to a band, oen coming at it from a guitar background as opposed to keyboards. Chechu is a new name to me, but he had some high profile guests take part in Kobi Farhi (Orphaned Land), Anna Murphy (Cellar Darling, ex-Eluveitie) and Zuberoa Aznarez (Diabulus in Musica). There are six original numbers, followed by two covers, namely Bjork’s “Hyperballad” and Sting’s “An Englishman In New York”. To be honest I could have done without the last, as not only is Aznarez Spanish and singing in accented-English but she is a woman. The idea of making it metallic is interesting, but I would have preferred different drums and keyboards, and a male with an English accent singing, I mean it is in the title! Putting that to one side, this is an intriguing release and I am looking forward to hearing more from Chechu.