Beats and yelling: Cosmic Jaguar

El Era Del Jaguar
Out 29^th May on Soman Records

Progressive overtures in metal are notoriously hard to pin down on paper. That being said, most listeners of a certain vintage would be confident in picking them out in a lineup. In terms of the facts on the ground, the history of progressive death metal is surprisingly uncontested, even if disagreement rages over the quantity to quality ratio within self-identifying progressive death metal outfits.

I’d speculate that one reason why this stylistic evolution is easier to trace within death metal in particular is because, much like thrash, it was a literal progression not just within the genre, but within individual artists. Death, Pestilence, Atheist, progressive music for these musicians was not seen as a birth rite, but something they literally progressed into as their musicianship, range of influence, and ambition expanded. Ditto for the likes of Voivod, Coroner, DBC, or Megadeth before them.

Today, “progressive” is treated as a flavour, often whipped into a concoction with “avant-garde”, “experimental”, or “post” in the contemporary milieu of ostensibly forward thinking metal. “Progressive” is taken to mean the antithesis of traditionally minded metal, with artists like Slayer, Bolt Thrower, or Motorhead becoming a shorthand for a certain variety of anti-prog.

This move dulls us to the actual mechanisms that were at play behind the progress turn of the late 80s. Slayer or Bathory, for example, were not anti-progressive. Within their first and most iconic run of albums there was a wealth of experimentation, diversity, and ambition. Just as full blooded progressive metal was never averse to deploying rudimentary techniques if the moment called for it. No, what set Progressive music apart from mere (lower case) progressive music was a form of stylistic and technical greed. An excess of genre hopping, along with the wealth of diverse music theory this entailed, was grounded by an allegiance to the primary genre, always referred back to as a fixed point, a narrative orientation.

This is distinct from the variant of avant-garde metal practiced for the last fifteen years or so, which emphasises its total lack of genre loyalty, going so far as to lash out at mother genres in acts of provocative self-destruction if commentators too readily brand them with a particular allegiance (e.g. Liturgy). Progressive metal, by contrast, at least the form articulated by its early practitioners, for all its greed and at times credulity straining tangents, was never afraid of regularly and explicitly paying tribute to the mother genre it arose from.

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With the lengthy pre-amble out of the way, we turn to the latest album from Ukraine’s Cosmic Jaguar, which, prima facie, sits at the border of progressive death/thrash, most obviously inviting comparisons to Atheist in their ‘Jupiter’ iteration, with ample reference points to the explosion of progressive extreme metal from the late 80s onwards. But being a modern outfit, Cosmic Jaguar by definition have more influences to call upon, making that aforementioned genre loyalty rest on thinner ice. They also, much like the majority of modern metal, articulate a specific conceptual vision (this one’s Aztec based), which finds its way into the music via pan flutes and various choices in percussion.

This places ‘El Era Del Jaguar’ on shaky ground, somewhere on the border between cacophonous/confusing mess and actually well crafted progressive metal with a distinct identity. Despite this rather tantric approach to venturing an opinion in this review, I’ll just clarify that this album is pretty great.

It confronts the listener as immediately obnoxious: the stylistic incontinence, the nods to retroism (which, to be fair, are relatively modest compared to most), and some genuinely odd choices (I demand an explanation for the jangle pop meets Death circa ‘Individual Thought Patterns’ mess that is ‘Ashes in Eyes’). Despite all this, and how obviously ‘El Era Del Jaguar’ is creaking under the weight of its broad set of influences, wealth of technique, and pure information stuffed within its contours, Cosmic Jaguar cling to a pleasing coherence with every fibre of their being.

Their stylistic greed knows no bounds, but without fail it returns to a solid foundation of death/thrash metal that somehow always makes sense within context, grounds the more eyebrow raising moments, providing essential framing devices just as things threaten to disappear up their own arsehole. For instance, a track like ‘Decapitated Lunar Goddess’ provides room and board for alt rock, darkwave vocals, a black metal adjacent main theme, technical thrash, percussive death metal, and a healthy dose of elaborate lead guitar material veering from classic heavy metal tonal centres to angular death metal nihilism. A feat which on paper reads like an unmitigated catastrophe. But Cosmic Jaguar exist in spite of my well practiced intuitions on what should work and what clearly doesn’t, daring me to write off their creation as a mutation in need of euthanasia. But this experience is simply too enjoyable to be left uninterrogated.

If my reluctance to pull the plug on ‘El Era Del Jaguar’ sounds like someone trying to rationalise why they like something they think they shouldn’t it’s because it is. I have clear and long gestated ideas on where metal went wrong in the last twenty years, especially in regard to the self-identifying “experimental” wing of the community. And Cosmic Jaguar commit many of the sins I associate with this decline. But the usual overreach, the deliberate quirkiness, the uncanny choice of instrumentation, all are harnessed by Cosmic Jaguar via a rigorous loyalty to their mother genres, namely the raw an reliable logic of thrash and death metal. Whether we treat this as an exception that proves the rule or a new data point demanding urgent revisions to theoretical frameworks is yet to be seen. Pound for pound, this is still an outlier of obnoxiously eclectic music that actually achieves a sense of coherence in spite of its own impulse to pull itself apart. But in and of itself, Cosmic Jaguar deserve all the credit for being at least one sign of life within metal circa 2024. Not just an enjoyable album, but a provocative one, consisting of the uncannily familiar, the novel, the outrageous, and eccentric. A hint that there is still scope for metal to lose control of itself and arrive at a destination almost by chance.