July 13th is Rock Day in Brazil and as such a good opportunity to review one of the majors Brazilian metal releases of 2020.
By Esdras Araújo
Seeking to evolve in our mission of spreading the best of rock and seeking to guarantee the plurality of vision, we are debuting a new collaborator: Esdras Araujo.
Released on February 7th, the Quadra, Sepultura's most recent release, is an exceptional album. We meet Sepultura at its best, with accurate riffs by Andreas Kisser, showing its unquestionable ability, the monstrous and destructive drums of Eloy Casagrande, and Derrick Green's great vocal performance. For me, by far, it is his best vocal performance, especially in the powerful choruses.
Since the album Dante XXI (released in 2006 and based on the work The Divine Comedy by the Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri), followed by A-Lex (released in 2009, inspired by the book A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess), Sepultura has been following a very challenging way of making concept albums. In Quadra, the band continues with the experimentalism and use of elements of progressive rock, already present in the previous album (Machine Messiah, also produced by Jens Bogren, in Sweden), but managed to make an album that’s even better than its predecessor.
Cohesive and heavy, without any fear of leaving their comfort zone, the band took a chance and hit the spot. In 12 high-level tracks, the lyrics discourses how economic, social, political and religious issues divide our society. The cover art bears a coin with the skull of an emperor, symbolizing the destruction caused by power.
One of the sources of inspiration was the book Quadrivium, organized by John Martineau, which comprises the four liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, music and cosmology), studied from Antiquity to the Renaissance as a way to glimpse the nature of reality, precursors of all physical sciences.
The album has as its concept the number four, and in fact can be, from an instrumental point of view, divided into four acts, with 3 songs each. The trash reigns sovereign in tracks 1 to 3. More percussive elements of tracks 4 to 6 (referring to the musicality of the Chaos A.D. and Roots albums). Experimentalism and progressive elements from tracks 7 to 9, and a more complex and elaborate instrumental, to finish with density and a more cadenced and somber sound in tracks 10 to 12.
Special attention should be taken to the Emmily Barreto’s, vocalist of the Brazilian band Far From Alaska, participation on the track "Fear; Pain; Chaos; Suffering". Quadra is a masterpiece and proves that Sepultura is more alive than ever.
Check out the video for "Means to an End" and Sepultura's live Q&A with Danko Jones & Derrick Green (available July 15th).
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