Bestial Devastation
Horrible title - very cliched in the wrong way. Maybe on purpose, who knows...
I got caught out by Wikipedia again, which lists Morbid Visions as Sepultura's debut - but in fact, it would appear, it is this album which is the debut.
This only makes it more impressive - and what makes it more impressive still (again, if Wikipedia is to be believed!) is that apparently, the band had an argument with their producer about the cleanness of the sound, playing him Venom to show how it should sound.
Venom were far from the best sounding of the early thrash-based bands (call them Black Metal if you must, but it's all thrash-based), so actually wanting to sound like them seems a bit mad for a band that surpassed them easily in terms of playing abilities.
Thankfully, then, the production here is nowhere near as bad as any of Venom's 4 releases up to this point, yet has the unmistakable Venom grind underneath it all. It sounds a lot like Possessed meeting Slayer, really, except without Possessed's mad time sigs.
Similarly to Morbid Visions, however, some uniqueness of sound comes through for "The Antichrist", and even more for "Necromancer", where a more brutal guitar tone is suddenly "discovered"
Before our ears, Sepultura have dropped the tuning of the guitars almost on a per-track basis, until the C# tuning of "Antichrist" - then tuned it up a semitone for "Necromancer", giving each track a distinctive tone, making the album feel heavier and heavier as it progresses - and re-eqing the guitars for each track.
"Empire of the Damned" features guitars that are slightly uncomfortably out of tune and a mega-scooped eq giving the distinctive boxy sound of Possessed. Less eq is scooped for the tone of the title track, with a crisper tone giving sharp relief to the demonically fast thrashing.
Pace is also increased and decreased with nice attention to overall album dynamic - "Antichrist" rips along at scary, Bathory speed and Necromancer begins at an almost doomy pace (for this genre), before piling headlong into a Slayer groove.
The final track, "Warriors of Death" begins with a satisfying bu-chi-bu-chi thrash drum lick, a la Sacred Reich, which propels the entire piece into oblivion.
On first listen, like its follow-up, there isn't anything really outstanding - but that's no different to listening to Possessed, Venom, Exodus - or even early Slayer for the first time.
Despite the variations in time, key and even style, the tracks all blur together to make one highly enjoyable thrash metal album, with nothing particularly outstanding - except, perhaps, in the multitude of changes in the final track.
I guess, like the others I mentioned, this is an album that reveals itself over time, which in my experience, is almost always the case with the earliest recordings in this genre, since the first thing you have to do is adjust yourself to the production, which is usually either a case of a producer not understanding what the band were trying to achieve (very common), or hideously low budget - or both.
Final opinion - every bit as worth getting as Morbid Visions - nearly as good as Seven Churches.
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