Rodrigo Y Gabriela hardly pause for breath on this, their third studio album.
The record, which is tipped to build the Dublin-based Mexican duo an international fanbase, begins with an emphatic shriek of a Spanish guitar and turns steadily more frenetic.
According to my iPod, Rodrigo Y Gabriela is to be filed under ‘world music’: in fact it seems explicitly to defy such pat stereotyping.
A snake-pit of acoustic overload, the LP sounds at once hot-coals frantic and laced with icy chunks of ennui. From the whipsmart Tropicana shuffle of opener ‘Tamacun’ to the Tex-Mex leer of ‘Satori’, there is no let-up, no room for compromise or refinement.
Throughout, part of the fun is in hazarding to guess where Rodrigo ends and Gabriela begins; their playing is a single passionate weave, an exocet of flamenco riffs and jerking melodic shifts.
It is also, to these ears at least, difficult to detect the imprint of producer John Leckie, the indie guru behind such staples of the student disco as The Stone Roses and The La’s. Maybe that’s him rattling maracas on ‘Diablo Rojo’.
Newcomers to the phenomenon might want to shuffle forward to Rodrigo y Gabriela’s red-toothed tilt at Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’, which buries the original’s Dungeons & Dragons bombast under a meteor hail of Latin-rock fury.
By the end, the listener may be left feeling like a human pinto doll, battered yet exalted. Rodrigo Y Gabriela, you sense, would have it no other way.