Los Angeles — Decked out in skin-tight leopard print spandex, his eyelids smeared with black make-up, singer Vega de la Rockha roars into a sea of raised "devil horn" hand gestures — the appreciation symbol of heavy metal music. Yet this is no ordinary metal concert. From under his silver sombrero, trumpeter El Cucuy then breaks into a mariachi melody, and Twisted Sister's classic "We're Not Gonna Take It" morphs into its Mexican folk equivalent — "No Toleraremos".
This is Metalachi, the self-proclaimed first and only heavy metal mariachi band.
"I think we've transformed the music enough to say that we actually came up with our own genre," El Cucuy (The Bogeyman)told Reuters backstage at a recent Los Angeles concert.
"There's some people that consider either mariachi music or metal music almost like a religion ... Every once in a while you come across people like that, but most of the time, people love what we do," he said.
Behind the flamboyant outfits and tongue in cheek stage names, the band keep their true identities cloaked in mystery. They hail from Los Angeles, may or may not be related to one another, and have been playing together in one configuration or another for about eight years.
Beyond that, they're not giving much away. — Reuters