Review by Greg on June 25, 2024.

I should be accustomed to avoiding judging books from their covers, as well as bands hailing from unexpected countries, by now, but there's something I don't quite get about Cosmic Jaguar. A line-up full of Spanish pseudonyms with a strong fondness for Aztec history and aesthetics, of all things, it's actually a project by most musicians involved with Ukrainian tech-thrash weirdos Bestial Invasion. Okay, they lured me by curiosity alone, but do they offer something worth it too? Well, mostly.

Let's keep things in order. The Legacy Of The Aztecs is their first LP, released in 2023, and it doesn't stray much away from the guys' other main band, being progressive thrash metal at its core. As much as I'd have liked to compare them to Acid Age, I'm afraid it should be for historical purposes only – Cosmic Jaguar are clearly more at home with the jazzy detours of Atheist than the venomous, spastic prog-isms of the Northern Irish outfit. Frontman Metal Priest, aka Sergio Lunático, delivers the interesting lyrics with a decidedly shrill timbre, sometimes at the expense of clarity, even if I can't claim to be the most apt person to judge his pronunciation of 'Teotihuacan', 'Quetzalcoatl' and so forth, especially when he already seems to struggle with English every now and then.

Jokes aside, the album begins with a triplet of songs that seemed promising, but failed to exactly convince me. Take opener 'Teotihuacan: City Of The Gods': the stop-start chorus arguably aimed to channel Kelly Schaefer and friends, but it only comes off as a total momentum killer. The refrains themselves are a peculiarity, since most of them follow the same call-and-response formula of repeating very similar sentences, usually including the song titles, and while it isn't a problem per se (Kobold's "Chaos Head", to name one, has the same issue, and it's still one of my absolute favourite albums of the current millennium), it doesn't help either. 'The Northern Underworld' is a blatant example of this aspect brought to its extreme.

From the ambient rain interlude 'Yoalli Tlauana (Hymn To A Night-God)', then, The Legacy Of The Aztecs' most convincing stint begins. 'Our Lord the Flayed One' and 'The Harbinger Of The Sun' showcase Cosmic Jaguar at their most badass here, the latter being the absolute highlight with a riffy first half, a wind instrument solo (!), and a last minute adorned with female vocals in Spanish (and they wouldn't surprise me if they had an equally awful pronunciation at that, for all I know). All-out weird for sure, and I'm here for it. 'Burn Your Gods (New Fire Ceremony)' is also a neat instrumental, despite its relatively conventional nature, lacking on the 'exotic' factor – but you shouldn't worry too much after hearing the jawdropping technicality on display.

It's a pity, then, that the album soon returns to its previous, merely solid level after it. A literally endless refrain soon giving way to yet another slightly pointless instrumental, and then to a grossly out-of-place cover of a pop song (with a puzzling ending, to boot), and you have a textbook case of an anticlimactic finale for the album. Which is a pity, since it makes The Legacy Of The Aztecs appear worse than it really is – but even before the most successful part, it was more a matter of casually throwing around a cool idea every once in a while, and less being constantly convincing. Let's say the best moments were enough to plant the idea they could do way better than this in my head. For once, I was right... but that's a story for another day.

Rating: 7.1 out of 10