SEPULTURA: A-Lex

Produced by Stanley Soares and Sepultura
Released: Yesterday

Sepultura's catalogue has been consistenty and increasingly ignored since Max Cavalera walked out on them more than a decade ago despite the fact that the majority of it is still pretty good. Andreas Kisser still cooks up insanely catchy and groovy riffs and Derrick Green's lyrics are possibly even better than those of the man he replaced. Yet while they remain popular, particularly on the live front where they can crush almost anyone, they have also become marginalised, bumped long ago from the label that made them and suffering lower and lower album sales since.
Coupled with that, Cavalera spent last year rubbing the salt into the wounds of his previous band with a pair of albums that rank with the best things he's done; Inflikted sounds more like Sepultura than Sepultura has since 1996. So to attain some form of relevance, this now completely Cavalera-free quartet really needed to pull something out of the box with A-Lex.

They have not succeeded.

Conceptually based around Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, A-Lex fails to fire on many levels. Essentially this is an attempt to expand on the musical direction of Dante XXI, with instrumental tracks and classical elements, but it just doesn't work. Most of the songs are built around similar Meshuggah-like riffs to the point where it's difficult to tell one from the next. Yet while Meshuggah can actually do this and somehow make it interesting, Sepultura does not, making A-Lex a turgid and interminable listen. Seven or eight songs go by that all sound like the same one, and a not-very-interesting one at that. Without Iggor Cavalera, the drumming has no flair and Kisser's one-dimensional mosh groove is simply uninspiring. Green, as usual, lives up to his end of the bargain but he isn't enough to save it here. Only "Ludwig van" where the guys break out into Beethoven's 5th is any kind of highlight.

A-Lex is nothing but a cobbled together mess. It's not hard to believe that the guys threw this together as some kind of answer to Inflikted, but if that's so, they forgot what the question was.

1. A-Lex I
2. Moloko Mesto
3. Filthy Rot
4. We've Lost You
5. What I Do!
6. A-Lex II
7. The Treatment
8. Metamorphosis
9. Sadistic Values
10. Forceful Behavior
11. Conform
12. A-Lex III
13. The Experiment
14. Strike
15. Enough Said
16. Ludwig van
17. A-Lex IV
18. Paradox

Rating: 30%