Rodrigo y Gabriela

Forget every other acoustic guitar duo you've ever heard. Mexico's Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero up the ante with an album that owes as much to Metallica as it does to Paco De Lucia and Al Di Meola. It's a hard-driving, high decibel, rutting and strutting cathartic melange of metal, jazz, Mexican, Spanish and Gypsy musics. It's also gloriously melodic, and it makes you feel mighty chipper.

Sanchez and Quintero are survivors of Mexico City's early-1990s metal scene, where they combined studies at the music conservatoire with playing in bands inspired by Megadeth and Metallica. Together with the fuck-you attitude to rules and regimes which shines through Rodrigo y Gabriela, this got them thrown out of the college, and towards the end of the decade they decided to take time out on the European busking circuit.

The excerpt above is from Chris May of All About Jazz Thanks to him I just discoverd Rodrigo y Gabriela. They are a great couple and their self titled album rocks.

Stairway To Heaven is excellent, but it's bettered by the other cover here, a seven-and-a-half minute version of Metallica's Orion, a masterpiece of majestic, posturing swagger. The originals are packed with riffs and ostinatos too, alternating with intricate, single-note, counterpoint passages—but hard-rock dynamics rule pretty much throughout. Produced by John Leckie (Baaba Maal but also The Verve, Stone Roses, Muse and Radiohead), the disc has the raw, unmediated feel of a live set.

- Their official web site

(And don't foget to search YouTube for Rodrigo y Gabriela ;)