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%

SEPULTURA: Live in Sao Paolo

Released: 2005

Yesterday I talked about the new Soulfly album, so by way of contrast I'll take a look back at Live in Sao Paolo, Sepultura's live offering from a few years back which was a sadly unspectacular showing from Max Cavalera's former band. For a band that all but imploded just as they’d really broken through and then offered up only a few ordinary albums since it wasn't that surprising that a live album would appear eventually as the band struggled for legitimacy as release after release met with little positive response.

Roorback was the best thing to come from this band for a long time up to this point but even that was pretty well ignored, so a double live CD recorded in the band’s hometown with a few special guests may well have been seen as the way to recover flagging support for a group that was at one point one of the world’s most influential thrash acts. Sepultura has never been the same without Max Cavalera and Derrick Green has always struggled to find acceptance as frontman. In truth the two men don’t really sound that different so that aspect is a moot point from where I stand. What can’t be argued about Live in Sao Paolo is the questionable mix. The vocals and drums are loud and clear but the guitar is often little more than a murky rumble in the background. I’m unsure if this was deliberate to create a more realistic “live” feel, and it does show off Igor Cavalera’s impressive sticks work, but I’ve heard bootlegs that sound better than this album.

With respect to the material included, the 21 tracks do give a nice career overview. Songs from Chaos AD and Roots make up the bulk of the content but all albums are represented. The uninspired cover of “Bullet the Blue Sky” could well have been dropped though, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what they were thinking with the hamfisted version of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Doing much of the stage banter in Portugese and bringing early Seps guitarist Jairo and Max Kolesne from Krisiun out for a couple of tracks is a nice touch, however.

As live albums go, Live in Sao Paolo isn’t great. I haven't seen the DVD taken of the same performance so I don't know if actually watching it would make it better, but the awful mix, the dodgy covers and the long-winded intro are big minuses and make it one for only the most die-hard fans.

CD 1

1. Intro
2. Apes of God
3. Slave New World
4. Propaganda
5. Attitude
6. Choke
7. Inner Self/Beneath the Remains
8. Escape to the Void
9. Mindwar
10. Troops of Doom
11. Necromancer

CD 2

1. Sepulnation
2. Refuse/Resist
3. Territory
4. Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
5. Bullet the Blue Sky
6. Reza
7. Biotech is Godzilla
8. Arise/Dead Embryonic Cells
9. Come Back Alive
10. Roots Bloody Roots

Rating: 40%