There are few purer pleasures than witnessing virtuosos in full flight. Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriella Quintero’s application of metal’s tenets of speed, flash and ostentatious technical excellence to Mexican flamenco might look daft on paper, but it works.
This live set was recorded last March at Tokyo’s Duo Club, so we get turbo-strums and arpeggiated frills delivered at hummingbird speed, thrash chords that lose none of their menace through being rendered unplugged, and percussive fills inflicted on the body of the acoustic that would put any Brazilian polyrhythmatist to shame.
This might be cheating in the context of a record review, but it’s worth mentioning that the DVD segment of the twin-set is instructive viewing, if only to figure out who does what, for the duo are absolute masters of what Keith Richards termed the ancient art of weaving. Except here it’s transposed to metal guru standards like Metallica’s ‘One’ and Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ as well as the more orthodox (but just as feverish) material such as ‘Satori’ and ‘Ixtapa’. Plus, we get to observe the exquisite Gabriella’s bodhran-like strumming technique at close quarters.
So, a live album that makes sense. Two Mexican butterflies flap flamenco wings, earthquakes occur in Tokyo.