Maria Fatal-Maria Fatal (1995)

 

Artist: Maria Fatal

Title: Maria Fatal

Label: Atzlan

Format: CD

Cat #: AZT-201-2

Year of Release: 1995

Country and Year of Edition Issue: US 1995

Listed Condition: VG+/VG

Sell Date: 8/15/25

Sell Price: $12.99

Discogs Last Sold: 8/2/22 VG/VG $2.99

Low: $2.99

Median: $4.00

Average: $5.99

High: $12.99

Current low price: $14.42

Current Number on Sale at Discogs: 3

Have/Want: 14/2

Where Sold: Hamilton, NJ

Time it took to sell: 2 weeks

Where and When Bought: found in a bag of discarded CD's on the street

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: B+

Sad To See It Go: No

One morning I was walking in Greenpoint past a record store and there was an empty box on the street "Free CD's!"    Thinking someone got a haul, I kept walking.  Around the corner there was a shopping bag with CD's scattered around that clearly had been rained on.  The contents in the bag itself looked ok and I had a free arm so what the hell, I'll take them home for further review.  I was tempted to ditch it myself, but I took it home, went through it, graded and priced it out.  It looked like some music industry workers discarded contents complete with a sealed Madonna single promo I put up for $100, so I'm thinking the someone picked up stuff from the box in front of the store and decided the bag was too heavy to deal with.  Into a box in my record room of boxes it went with about 100 other CD's of mostly Latin and Dance titles from the 90's mixed with things like Aerosmith's Get A Grip with the CD missing.  Often when you find 100 random CD's and list them a handful of them will sell and you don't know which ones they will be or for how much.    This is the first one to sell and I got $13 for it.

Maria Fatal is a mid-90's to early aughts alternative rock band from Los Angeles that came from Mexico City.  Their label was out of San Francisco and specialized in the "Rock En Español" genre that got some US publicity when this came out.  I remember putting up a few visiting girls from Chile when I was on 9th & C in the late aughts with a spare bedroom for a month and they asked what Spanish Rock bands I liked.  Since they had modern late aughts alt-rock taste, this is the kind of band I think they were talking about that I was ignorant of.  The record was in Spanish and the band sounded like post-grunge commercial rock but there were some cool things on Maria Fatal's debut that stood out in this context that made this enjoyable for me to listen to several times to have something to say about it.

Certain songs kept jumping out. "Las Aves" has soaring vocals that make it my favorite track.  The sax that comes unexpectedly during the closer "Dago" was a nice touch.  The opener, "La Soga," kicks off with a ska feel that was familiar the third time around.

Interesting album to listen to.