"Se titula igual que una novela que leí hará un par de años, pero esto no es una ucronía sobre judíos cabalistas muertos, más bien es la banda sonora para una apocalíptica película de desastres que en lugar de pasar en USA transcurre entre Santurce y Bilbao y en la que quien saca las castañas del fuego no es un policía indisciplinado pero majete que masca chicle todo el día, sino cinco vascos pillados con Neurosis que se acaban de comprar una cortadora de cabezas último modelo."
(Vice Magazine)


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You know those Sababthy stoner metal riffs that Isis sometimes launches into on their albums? Well, this Spanish band has extrapolated those passages into an entire album, their first for the also-Spanish doom/sludge label Odio Sonoro. It's impossible to ignore the comparisons to Isis that this band displays on "Danza De Nieblas", primarily early Isis with the huge monolithic chugging and the propulsive hypnotic grooves and epic riffage. While most of the stuff that comes in the door that cops that Isis sound heavily usually gets tossed into the freebies bin, Neila caught my attention by putting a slight twist on this sound, and it's quite a bit more interesting than the majority of their peers. For one, Neila drops lots of symphonic keyboard all over the album, giving songs like "From Hell" a swirling orchestral ambience behind all of the crushing metallic riffage. For another, the vocals, when they appear, are super harsh and blackened, and there's some killer full on metal soloing that shows up on a bunch of these songs as well, plus some wicked bluesy leads in "Amanece" and "Odisea". Some of the riffing has a kind of thrash metal sound to it, albeit slowed down into massive tectonic grooves, and there's plenty of lighter forays into expansive instrumental math rock, although these too are usually accompanied by pretty keyboards that give it a dense new agey atmospheric feel, like someone dropped Christopher Franke from Tangerine Dream smack dab into the middle of Isis's In The Absence Of Truth.
Which of course means that if you're totally sick of that whole Isis-inspired sound, this isn't so wildly different that it'll have you changing your tune. But if the idea of a more atmospheric, new agey, keyboard-heavy version of the Isis sound sounds like heaven, the this is your band!