The great and terrible thing about music is that anybody can make it. Literally, any body: right now, friend, you can tap your feet or hum a tune or pluck a rubber band and make music all by your own self. Birds and bugs and all other sorts of creatures make music, too, but you can do it even if you aren’t currently horny.
Hello, I am worried we have gotten off on the wrong foot. The thing I am supposed to be here to tell you about is the Mexican band Cemican’s upcoming album, U k’u’uk’ankil Mayakaaj. Based out of Guadalajara in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, Cemican plays a thoroughly modern form of mostly subgenre-less metal, although the most notable flavors come from groove, death, and folk metal. I am having trouble tracking down reliable information about who exactly is in the band – the promo email and Bandcamp band photo indicate six people – but the fact that the venerable Metal-Archives lists seven members and indicates that five of them provide, among their other duties, “Wind instruments” feels like the correct emotional (if perhaps not factual) truth of the matter.
Because yes, oh yes, my beautiflute friends, one of the things that Cemican incontrovertibly can do is rock a flute, a pan flute, a panpipe, an Irish-sounding reed, a piper’s pipe, a peck of pickled piper’s pecs. And the thing about some of these instruments? You can’t really tune them. Whether or not this is a problem depends on how much tin ear you like with your tin whistle, I guess, but the point is, as I suggested above, that music is for, by, and from everyone. Someone makes a sound, and we take in that sound and perhaps say “yes, please, let’s have some more” or perhaps we say, “no thank you.” Across the 66+-minute spread of Cemican’s fourth album, I found myself saying both things.
Maybe I’m making this out to be some kind of department store kiosk album of nature sounds and neutered New Age “world” music, which Cemican devoutly is not (or, at least… not exclusively). The backbone of U k’u’uk’ankil Mayakaaj is clearly a deeply-felt ritualistic groove channeled into heavy heavy metal that spends equal time chugging and tumbling. Some of the most apt comparisons for your ears to consider might be Rotting Christ’s Rituals, Sepultura’s Roots, or Kalaveraztekah’s Nikan Axkan (conveniently reviewed earlier this year by yours truly), but I also pick up hints of Eluveitie, Orphaned Land, middle-era Therion, and (unironically) Yanni’s Ethnicity album.
Album opener “Kukulkán Wakah Chan” takes its time setting the scene with an atmospheric intro featuring spoken word, hand shakers, flute, and wordless chanting, but at the 1:09 mark, the snaking, muscular guitar riff that kicks things off is legit as balls. Right around the three-minute mark, Cemican whips out some spirited death metal riffing and near-blastbeats before lapsing into a stuttering groove breakdown which in turn yields to a tasteful guitar solo. It’s a powerful opening salvo, but in cycling through many of Cemican’s modes of attack, it previews an over-long album that is always competent but not always fully engaging.
At about exactly the halfway point of “Tán tí le Xibalba,” some of you may feel that you are being invited to jump da fuc up when you might prefer to stay da fuc sat down, but I enjoy the way Cemican mixes more streamlined death metal riffage with crowd-moving groove and breakdowns. And part of that might really be the key to the music here: on most of Cemican’s songs, the truth and power of them comes from how well you can convince yourself that you are part of a collective ritual, a fully committed part of a greater mass of bodies lunging and heaving as one. That’s maybe a fancy way to say that these songs would probably kill in a live setting more than they sometimes do on record, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. Cemican appear – both in iconography and language – to be rooted in the dual histories of their homeland, with songs split about in half between Spanish (the language of the colonizers) and Nahuatl (the language of the indigenous Maya civilization whose cosmology the band so frequently invokes). That attention to linguistic and historical detail adds a layer of passion that is undeniable in the band’s performance.
The late-album pairing of “Los Guardianes” and “Hun-Came” hits particularly hard, with the former ranking as one of the most acrobatically metal songs and the latter ending with a really effective climax that layers pounding tribal percussion, several vocal tracks, roiling double-bass, and keyboard symphonics. But elsewhere, things don’t always pan out as strongly. “El niño que contemplaba a las estrellas” features powerful female lead vocals and a simple but sweeping chorus, but it might verge just a touch too far into Eurovision fodder. “Viaje astral del quetzal de fuego” opens with low throat-singing and chiming percussion, and although it eventually settles into a hugely satisfying slow groove, it rides the same mode out for far too long across its 8.5-minute runtime.
I could keep telling you more things and making more jokes (like, for example, how I would tell you about the song “¿Dónde estás?” except that I can’t find you), but the conclusion is that U k’u’uk’ankil Mayakaaj is a good album that I do not particularly love. (By that logic, you might accuse me of trying to tell you there’s no such thing as a bad album, only an album that is bad for a particular listener. I… mostly would not argue!) Frankly, it’s much too long and eventually becomes indistinct from itself. The things that Cemican does, they generally do quite well, but I don’t know that I always want to hear those things they do.
About six years ago, I was in the beautiful Mexican city of Mérida for a good friend’s wedding. While there, we visited the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya (the Great Mayan World Museum), an excellent museum in a striking modernist/Brutalist building dedicated to the cultural, artistic, and archaeological history of the Mayan civilization. If you ever find yourself in Mérida, I highly recommend the museum, but as a terrible American dummy who only speaks English (and mangles French), it was a fascinating experience. All the exhibits and information were bilingual, but Spanish/Mayan bilingual rather than Spanish/English bilingual. It is, first of all, an important experience for everyone to know what it is like to navigate a world that is not designed for you and in which you are an uncomprehending visitor doing your best. But secondly, it offered a peculiar experience of partial understanding, attempting to glean from multiple vocabularies the things that were familiar or understandable, and taking away few precise details but a lasting gestalt impression. That, as it turns out, is a pretty good way to describe this album.
