The Columbia Gypsy
PUYA
Union
MCA 2001
My daughter Emma was sitting in on "Enchanted Pain" at KEOS a couple years ago and put on a random track from Puya's first album. "Well, mother, it wasn't what I thought it would be, at least it wasn't metal," she mused.
The Puerto Rican band Puya is named for a bromiliad and maybe a dance style, and plays a mix of rap-metal and Latin music. My guess for the metal roots is thrash, I've read *hard core, but if you don't listen to metal (and I don't listen to this kind of metal), you might just call it "death-metal" or more simply "metal." Their earlier album Fundamental for the most part thrashes back and forth abruptly between genres (rap-metal and Latin) like some other Latin rock bands...Café Tacuba...or for that matter some metal bands like the Swedish Opeth. Union still has that abruptness but it there is more and better fusion, same sound, better fusion.
Who would listen to such a schizophrenic mix of rap, jazzy Santana and Sepultura? Metalheads, I guess, as they are on the road with Fear Factory, unless concert-goers want to use Puya as the controlled substance break at midnight. The aura of rap sort of kills it for me, these aren't handsome mystery-eyed Brazilians with long black tresses that whip around, these are Puerto Rican urban street guys with baseball caps:
"this is Puya coming straight to ya,The lyrics...part Spanish, which I didn't translate, and part English are contemporary, "Resist, resist a little more." If anything, it is the voice of Puerto Rican unity, or merely unity or defiance. Mercifully some of the rap is in Spanish. Sometimes Puya sings Latin jazz harmony, sometimes they rap, sometimes they growl...
Musically, it's great to hear the Latin percussion with the power of a throbbing bass. My favorite track...at least the one where I said "This is it!" is "Si Aja." They've got a bunch of guest musicians on there, MCA says (this was on the web, the jacket isn't worth s-t, hence they were almost "guess musicians"): "Turning the record into something of a Puerto Rican jam, Puya invited such guest performers as pianist Brenda Hopkins (sister of Puya bassist Harold Hopkins), legendary crash metal guitarist John Dones, old school rumba percussionists Cachete Maldonado, Anthony Carrillo, Raphael Vargas, Hector Lebron, and legendary trumpet player Juancito Torres," so I suppose it's the rhumba-metal I like. Another killer track is "Ahorake," where the congas, bass, bird-whistles, hot guitar and brass all go at it all at once.