Sepultura
Morbid Visions

THE REVIEW

Take two old BC Rich guitars with irreparably compromised electronics and connect them respectively to your home's intercom and your mother's toaster. And detune them. Then take a nice set of pots, the kind they sell you with the threat of abandonment in the heart of Barbagia, on one of those all-inclusive day trips, 15 euros - by bus for the elderly. Position yourself behind these instruments. Then grab your seven-year-old cousin and put a bass in her hands (the result might have been even better). Call your cousin's classmate - yes, the one born with forceps, on that day when, due to a miscommunication, a plumber was operating - stuff her with acid, show her "Amityville Possession", give her paper and crayons and have her make a nice drawing for the cover. Finally, steal your grandmother's "Carmina Burana" record, just to create the intro and outro. You're almost there. What's missing still? Oh yes, you need to record the album. So, write a handful of lyrics like "Satan is my consultant", steal your sister's karaoke machine, retreat to the living room, each with a glass of caipirinha, and unleash your rage. The result? It depends. If your name is Mario Rossi or Giuseppe Brambilla, it might not be the best. But if your names are Max Cavalera, Igor Cavalera, Jairo Guedz, and - alas! - Paulo Jr., the result will be nothing less than ONE OF THE MOST DEVASTATING DEATH METAL ALBUMS OF ALL TIME!

Guitars like chainsaws (but the bass more like a half-assed attempt), with that buzzing distortion drilling into your brain like a dentist's drill, a drum kit that offers no respite, still primitive and regressed but relentlessly determined to destroy, and a muddy voice mixing adenoids and throat polyps. It's precisely the strongly naive quality of the entire album - Sepultura's debut if you exclude the "Bestial Devastation" EP from the previous year - that makes this work sinister, unsettling, and beautiful. The basic technique, the terrible recording, the naivety of both the lyrics and the songwriting, the bassist who is more of a divine punishment than a bassist, do not detract a single gram from the splendor of this album, and indeed they highlight even more the rage (and the thrill of being able to channel it into notes) of a band that would only need another couple of years to give us "Schizophrenia" and "Beneath the Remains".

Each track is a pearl of malice. Overall, the album is very - even too - homogeneous, the structures repeat, and the sounds don't change, but therein lies its beauty. Because listening to "Morbid Visions" is like entering a dark and smoky swamp, where no matter how you turn your gaze, you see nothing but black, bubbling muck, and sinister shadows skimming you from every side. In short, even though the songs all somewhat resemble each other, and in some cases are hard to distinguish (see the beginning of "Troops of Doom" and "Funeral Rites"), the album strikes straight to the heart, and you can't help but love it. And a song like "War" is worth the listen alone, a monolithic fresco of malice, with an insistent instrumental refrain and a piercing guitar solo like an agonizing scream.

If an alien delegation arriving on Earth threatened to destroy us unless we introduced them to true Death Metal, as well as Reign in Blood by Slayer, Scream Bloody Gore by Death, and Seven Churches by Possessed, I would give them this. Hoping they forgive us for Paulo Jr.!