Band:	Blue Hummingbird On The Left
Album:	Atl Tlachinolli
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	February 2019

01. Sun / War Club
02. Blood Flower
03. Precious Death
04. Hail Huitzilopochtli
05. Rain Campaign
06. Life Death Rebirth
07. Tenochtitlan
08. Storm
09. Southern Rules Supreme - Moon

War metal is nasty business. Especially nasty when there's so much cultural background to fuel the fire.

Blue Hummingbird On The Left admittedly sounds like quite a stupid band name, but it makes more sense when you know that it is the literal translation of the name of the Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli. They might as well have gone by that name instead, but I would have had to copy-paste it at every instance. You may have heard of the Black Twilight Circle circle before (here's a great article on them), an indigenous-rooted Mexican-American collective of black metal bands themed around Native American (mostly Aztec) mythology and struggles.

What made Blue Hummingbird On The Left interesting among the other BTC bands on their demo/EP was their use of flute to contrast their war metal sound. Not all the time, but noticeably often; it feels like on this record, their full-length debut, its use is even more reduced, though there are moments when that and some other folk instruments really take the helm, like in "Life Death Rebirth", and it sounds grand. At least as grand as raw-sounding war metal can sound. It's also a really nice bonus that the drumming sounds tribal at times, though these are all elements of their music I expected to be much more fleshed-out and put at the forefront. Instead, most of the time we get some mildly interesting war metal.

The production is obviously a bit more polished than the previous release, but it still sounds absolutely raw. This may take a bit from the impact that some of the riffs and drumming could have, but it does give the whole album a slightly psychedelic feel. Not the fun, floating-through-space psychedelic feel, but the soldier-high-on-a-kill-frenzy psychedelic feel. I mean, it fits thematically. With vocals that are that brief and aggressive and primal with occasional howls, this feeling becomes even more apparent. The songwriting isn't as repetitive as I thought it would be, but a 30-minute-long war metal album doesn't really need much.

I still hope there's room left to grow for Blue Hummingbird On The Left, as it is that tribal part of their sound that makes them so interesting and I'd love to hear them expand that. Also it's time for more BTC bands to finally release their first full-lengths... especially Axeman. But until then, time for war and devastation.