adg211288 During your formative years of discovering a genre of music, in this case metal, there are always going to be bands that you really enjoy at first who then get left on the roadside as their genre doesn't become one of your favourites. Years later, we suddenly stumble across that band in our libraries or collections of physical media (those of us who still have them anyway) and for a brief time may listen to them again, looking back in nostalgia for a while until consigning them once again to the oblivion that is the depths of our libraries and shelves that we know we should dust more often than we do.

Once in a while however, you stick one of those forgotten records on and there's only one thing you can say about it. You'd forgotten, to your shame and regret, just how fucking good it was. In this story the band is Breed 77 (pronounced breed seven-seven) and the album is In My Blood (En Mi Sangre) (2006). This is actually one of four albums I own from these guys, but it was my first one and it was always the best to my ears.

I have never come across another band that is quite like Breed 77. They play alternative metal/hard rock mixed with elements, of all things, of flamenco. Of course given that the band originally hails from Gibraltar, the appearance of flamenco in their music shouldn't be all that surprising, except that they're a metal band. Of course if there's anything that over ten years listening to metal has taught me, it's that you can do pretty much anything with metal and make it work.

And yet this unusual fusion of sounds isn't even why Breed 77's In My Blood is so damn good. It's simply a hard rocking, metallic and infectious little album of memorable songs like Petroleo (You Will Be King), Alive, Blind and many others. A big part of this is their incredible vocalist Paul Isola. His accented vocals, which sometimes slip between English and Spanish lines within the same song, suit the flamenco tinged metal and softer parts in equal measure, only briefly relying on some harsh screams in the title word of Blind, which was a departure for the band as even the previous album Cultura (2004), which I didn't hear until later so was never as familiar with, had more extensive use in tracks like La Ultima Hora and The Only Ones. Isola's growls are actually quite effective in Breed 77's music, but the man has one hell of a singing voice, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone to hear him using it more completely on In My Blood.

An album that was a genuine pleasure to rediscover (and will be prompting me to do the same with their other albums I own plus check out the ones that released since they fell off my radar), I'm certainly not planning to forget about In My Blood again in a hurry. Unfortunately it doesn't look like Breed 77 is around any more despite no official word on calling it a day, so this one may have to go down as one of the 2000's hidden and forgotten gems. Well worth checking out for anyone in search of a band with a unique sound.