Sepultura
Revolusongs

My cousin bought it in Brazil during one of his stays with his in-laws, urged by his wife's nephew, down in Rio, who was ecstatic about it. Back in Italy, he listened to it once or twice and then gave it to me, shaking his head. Lazybones…

And what the heck! South American thrash metal, not even among the bloodiest. The record is just a simple EP, an extended playing nevertheless featuring eight tracks (the last of which is inexplicably omitted in the cover notes) and capable of reaching twenty-eight minutes.

All covers... respectively of Hellhammer, Massive Attack, Public Enemy, Devo, Jane's Addiction, U2, Exodus, and Metallica. Meaning a trio of thrash "colleagues" and a healthy metal mutation of hip and trip hop episodes, new wave, and pop rock for the rest.

Not widely distributed around the world and therefore rare to find on retailers' shelves, the album is from the period (2002) when only one of the Cavalera brothers, drummer Igor, was left in the lineup, who also left a few years later. On the microphone now evolves Max's replacement, the (American, and black) singer Derrick Green. His moderate growl pervades much of the album's tracks, immediately rendering the hip hop "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" appropriately cavernous, in which a guest rapper, the Paulista Sabotage, vainly evolves (out of context).

It's too cool to hear a death/thrash band grapple with the classic dry, obsessive, super new wave riff of "Mongoloid", the mythic Devo's first success. The foray into Jane's Addiction territory with "Mountain Song" is equally tantalizing, although even dressed in heavy guitar lead, the "Bullett Blue Sky" from the Irish superstar quartet remains dull, like almost all of their repertoire. Fortunately, the recovery of blood brothers Exodus follows closely, a two hundred percent thrash episode, swift as dust, in which Igor can unleash all his exuberance with the double bass drum.

The album's last contribution, the almost "ghost" one as mentioned at the start, consists of a shard of just over a minute, in which Sepultura cover Metallica in garage form, offering thirty seconds of "Enter Sandman" and then forty of "Right Fire with Fire"... well…

Maybe it's not the right work to initially approach these metallers from Belo Horizonte, but I don't think it's that alienating either. Certainly, Max Cavalera appears irreplaceable, Green is not the right fit, and thus three stars minus minus, my apologies to the fans.