German duo Albez Duz evidently derive their name from some medieval Germanic meaning “swan noisiness” or “swan rush.” Because I don’t know what either of those things are, I’ll be sticking to my original theory that it is short for “Albez Perzival Wulfric Brian Duzzledore,” which frankly is much more fun for all of us.
Name jokes aside, The Duzzers do something pretty cool on sophomore effort The Coming of Mictlan: they find a kind of midpoint between more epic doom and the goth/tongue-in-cheek brilliance of Type O Negative. In fact, at different times throughout the album, virtuoso vocalist Alfronso Brito Lopez sounds like Reverend Bizarre’s Albert Witchfinder, Peter Steele, or a combination of the two, complete with all of the theatrical inflections and notes of cheese you’d expect. The music itself harkens to everything from the aforementioned Type O and Reverend to Candlemass, slower Sentenced, and even doom/goth-era Tiamat.
If the name dropping implies anything, it’s that Albez Duz isn’t doing a whole lot original on The Coming of Mictlan, and while that is certainly true, it doesn’t really dampen what is both a quality album in its own right and a knowing wink to the past. After an intro, “Fire Wings” gives listeners a good idea of this homage with some rather large riffage and one righteous chorus, the finish of which is hammering. However, the band wisely holds some tricks for subsequent tracks, be they lurching minimalism layered with pipe organ (“Feathered Snake”), variations in that wonderful vocal performance (chants, whispers, deep Steele-isms, etc.), and a studio treatment that smartly changes things up.
In this way, the album stays fresh. But most importantly, to the right ears, it also stays fun—both as a result of the obvious influences and due to little turns in the songwriting. The solo section in “Mictlan,” for example, is just begging for some hand claps, but leaving them out – and letting the listener add them with a drunken grin – helps the song stay equal parts dramatic and rawk. (A balance that Lee Dorrian, thankfully, never quite learned.) Similarly, “Servants of Light” puts the foot to the (relative) gas pedal while inducing plenty of toe taps, but also gets into some serious down tempo material draped with eerie sitar and deep chants, another example of the kind of fun details that Albez Duz drops on the album.
Granted, there are times when the meandering songwriting style likely gets in its own way just a tad, and the band can’t reach towards the highest of heights as often as its biggest influences, but there are more than a few moments on the album in which they reveal themselves to be ace songwriters. Chief among those is closer “Twist In My Sobriety,” which features the band at their absolute gothiest in its ’95-Tiamat-fronted-by-Steele glory. An absolute gem of a track that begs for repeated (and repeated) listens, it shows exactly how great this band is when firing on all cylinders.
The hope, then, is that Albez Duz can deliver a full album of similar quality without sacrificing any of their subtle variety. Until then, The Coming of Mictlan offers more than enough to satisfy those hungering for this particular and currently-rare-in-quality mix of styles.
