Saul Blanch has died at the age of seventy five. He was the first singer of Rata Blanca, and his voice is the one on their self titled debut from 1988.
That record matters more than a first album usually does. Argentina had almost no infrastructure for this music at the time, and the band, built around Walter Giardino's guitar, were the ones who proved a Spanish language heavy metal album could sell there at all. Everything that followed in that country has it somewhere behind it.
Blanch sang on it and then left, before the records that made the band famous across Latin America. He is the voice of the start rather than of the peak, which is a particular kind of place in a band's history and one that is easy to overlook while the catalogue keeps growing.
He died on 20 October. The band have ten albums and more than fifty releases behind them now, forty one years after they started.