The really amazing thing about Rata Blanca is that those videos could be from any year from today all the way back to about 1970.
The look, the hair, the riffs, the lyrics (in whatever language)-nothing has changed, nothing is any different from similar bands in 1975, 1985, 1995, or, for all we know, 2045.
Heavy Metal like that is almost like traditional folk music- it is played today exactly as your grandfather played it, wearing the same clothes, hair, and hopefully using the same guitar.
Not much different from Cape Breton Fiddle music, or Japanese Koto music- its a fly caught in amber.
It is a bit ironic that the music movement that was invented in reaction to how stodgy, boring, and, ultimately, conservative heavy metal was, PUNK ROCK, is now over 30 years old.
I enjoyed many of the proto-metal bands, back in the day- still have all my Blue Oyster Cult on vinyl, somewhere. But when it became so rigid and formulaic, when Lemmy gave way to Ozzy, and brains, creativity, and progress left the movement, I bailed too.
I was living in Seattle in the early 80's, when the first Grunge bands decided to see if they could fuse what was good about heavy metal with the rebellion and rule breaking qualities of punk- and those bands were pretty great- the MonoMen, Green River, Mr. Epp, The Melvins, Mudhoney- but then, commercialism took over, formulas were imposed, and radio play and sales became the most important thing.
The most interesting Metal stuff I have heard lately is a branching from that- the Olympia Washington band, Earth, which has been around so long Kurt Cobain played in it briefly before starting Nirvana, has been inspiring many bands to rethink Metal as trance inducing, drones of guitar washes that are still loud, proud, and most definitely Heavy, but not quite so dumb.
Sunn O, Kinski, and a whole host of other bands are taking Metal in these directions, and some of it is really great.
And Earth, themselves, are still rocking it pretty hard. I saw them play live a couple of weeks ago, and I was transcended to another plane- a 120 DB meditative trance, better than yoga.
