I’ve been a fan of Max Cavalera’s music for 30 years, off and on. I saw Sepultura in 1993 or maybe 1994 at the Newark, NJ shithole Studio One; they were touring in support of their then-new album Chaos A.D., with openers Clutch, Fear Factory, and Fudge Tunnel (the band I was really there to see). Almost a decade later, in August 2002, I saw Cavalera again, opening for Slayer at NYC’s Roseland with his post-Sepultura group, the tribal nü-metal act Soulfly. The Slayer fans weren’t into it, and honestly neither was I.
I came around on Soulfly when I worked for their label, Roadrunner Records, between 2011 and 2014. They had abandoned most of the tribal and world-music aspects of their sound in favor of grimy thrash, and released one album, Enslaved, while I was there. It was pretty good, but it was also their final release for the label.
The group I really liked at that point was Cavalera Conspiracy, which Max and his brother Iggor (who had stayed with Sepultura when Max left, causing a decade-long rift between the brothers) formed in 2006, after reuniting at a memorial concert for Max’s son. Their debut album, Inflikted, came out in 2008, while I was editor of Metal Edge magazine; I put Max and Iggor on the cover dressed in black suits and sunglasses like the Blues Brothers. Inflikted was a crude, noisy blast of hardcore thrash, with Soulfly’s Marc Rizzo on guitar and Gojira’s Joe Duplantier on bass. On 2011’s Blunt Force Trauma, they were even harder and more punk; Duplantier was gone, replaced by Johny Chow, formerly of Fireball Ministry. On the third Cavalera Conspiracy album, 2014’s Pandemonium (released on Napalm), Converge’s Nate Newton played bass. (I interviewed Max when it came out.) Their fourth release, 2017’s Psychosis, featured multiple guests, including Justin Broadrick of Godflesh and Dominick Fernow of Prurient and Vatican Shadow. While their sound evolved somewhat from album to album, it was always crude, punishing and heavy as fuck.
Soulfly, too, seemed to get heavier and angrier with every record. Max signed with Nuclear Blast and has put out four albums — 2013’s Savages, 2015’s Archangel, 2018’s Ritual, and 2022’s Totem — which are among the most ferocious material he’s ever recorded. He’s also put together some interesting side projects like the arty Killer Be Killed (with members of Dillinger Escape Plan, Mastodon and Converge) and the crushing, primitive Go Ahead And Die, with his son Igor Amadeus Cavalera.
In recent years, the Cavalera brothers have been touring and playing Sepultura songs, in an act of overt nostalgic fan service. (N.B.: Sepultura never broke up; they’re currently led by guitarist Andreas Kisser and bassist Paulo Jr., and have released some good albums, but I never listen to them.) And now they’ve gone all the way into Taylor Swift territory, and re-recorded the band’s earliest releases, the Bestial Devastation EP (originally a split with the mostly forgotten Overdose) and Morbid Visions. And…I’m enjoying the results more than I thought I would.
Sonic crudity for its own sake is never a selling point for me. While I love some bands that employ noise and primitive technology as an aesthetic tool (e.g., Pussy Galore), the argument that lo-fi recording is a marker of authenticity is a bunch of bullshit. Generally speaking, artists are trying to make their music sound as good as possible, within the parameters of their aesthetic. Recording under subpar conditions on faulty or inadequate equipment has more often than not been a sacrifice made in order to get the music out, not a deliberate choice. When, for example, a black metal band with access to quality equipment (and in the age of digital recording, pretty much everyone has access to quality equipment) chooses to make their album sound like it was recorded through the condenser mic on a pawnshop jambox because “that’s how Darkthrone did it,” I lose interest very fast.
My point is, the early Sepultura material was good music recorded badly. They had a Slayer-esque thrash sound, with songs full of quality riffs, Max delivered the lyrics in a brutal roar, and Igor was a caveman who occasionally displayed flashes of real rhythmic inspiration. Both men have honed their craft for over 30 years, and these new versions of the old songs, recorded with Igor Amadeus Cavalera on bass and Daniel Gonzalez of Gruesome and Possessed handling the guitar leads, are absolutely crushing. They haven’t rewritten anything or changed the arrangements to bring them more in line with modern extreme metal styles; this is pure, battering-ram ’80s thrash, played at full throttle and mixed to sound as dense and punishing as possible. But it’s no longer a messy blur, the way the original recordings were. You get to appreciate the songs — and two new ones written back then but never recorded, “Sexta Feira 13” on Bestial Devastation and “Burn the Dead” on Morbid Visions — at full strength, as they’d likely have released them back then if they could have.
Max Cavalera’s devotion to craft is genuinely admirable. He’s followed his own muse for decades, from crude, furious thrash to inventing nü-metal and importing indigenous sounds and elements of spiritual jazz into metal (Sepultura and early Soulfly) to flirting with industrial (Nailbomb) to returning to hardcore and sonic brutality with Cavalera Conspiracy and Go Ahead and Die. And even these re-recordings, which could seem like a cynical cash grab, are delivered with total intensity and commitment. I don’t often listen to early Sepultura (read: anything before 1991’s Arise), but I can see myself pulling out these re-recordings for a quick blast of energy during the summer months. And I very much hope to hear a new Soulfly or Cavalera Conspiracy album one of these days.
—Phil Freeman