Tozago as Deismno

I got Holocausto’s first three outings some time in the late-90’s by a guy who also strongly advised me to not bother with the album reviewed here as it was a noisy piece of garbage that was going to diminish my liking for the band. Well, I didn’t have any liking for the band to begin with, not at that time anyway, but I chose to heed the guy’s piece of advice.

In 2005 I come across the band’s comeback effort “De Volta ao Front”, a tasteless mish-mash of noisy hardcore and modern leftovers from the previous decade, clearly one of the more embarrassing reunion attempts made in the new millennium, and I decide to give this opus here a listen, just to check if it could be any worse than this “Volta”. And it turned out that yes, it can actually, as this album can rightfully be placed right next to the other genuinely deplorable flop on Brazilian soil, Sarcofago’s “The Worst”.

Coming straight after the excellent “Negatives”, a spacey progressive thrash affair with echoes of Voivod, this effort was such a radical turn from their newly acquired more technical stance that it could pass for the work of an entirely different crew altogether. In fact, this ridiculous over-an-hour-long amalgamation can hardly pass for music for most of the time. What our friends have decided to do for a change, and also as a conformist’s gesture towards the settling industrial/groovy/aggro forces, was to embrace the noisy industrial soundscapes whole-heartedly, to the point that they have produced one of the most industrial opuses out there at the time, but all in a bad way.

Like another reviewer here has pointed too well, the delivery is quite comparable to the one of the British industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, only that the 90’s industrial environment was way more dynamic, much more closely bound to the metal shenanigans, and much more music-related. This effort here is just a pile of annoying noises that would get on the listener’s nerves way before the opening 7.5-min “Arisnafr o Chupão Rrerezamn” is over, this one a mish-mash of the highest order with just samples and synthesized semi-recitals crossing each other the whole time; again, no music here under any form. Shades of the latter pop up here and there, like on the weird creepy Godflesher “Epamenorr” or on the hypnotic, but ultimately monotonous Swans-esque “Isabelle And Danielle” and “So…”, but their number is simply not big enough to compensate for the presence of off-putting “the Belo Horizonte industrial district” takeouts like “De Illusionist Presidipamn”, and especially for the arguably most boring closing string of tracks in the annals of metal, three altogether, each within the 8-min mark and neither containing not even a single guitar, or bass, or at least a keyboard-induced note… incredible, but a fact.

To consider this a piece of music one really has to have very, very wild imagination; in fact, even the Throbbing Gristle exploits come closer to our favourite pastime than this concoction of sloppily assembled noises that makes no sense whatsoever even as a downright radical representation of the most extreme branch of the industrial movement. Besides, the latter’s fanbase would hardly be very amused listening to this excessively long tribute to the sounds emitted from factories and plants from around the world as by that time such experiments had long since outstayed their welcome on the scene.

Well, it was the friggin’ 90’s, for crying out loud… anything went back then including stream-of-consciousness-like piles of noise like the one presented here. However, even in a most undemanding from a proficiency point-of-view environment this album sticks out like a sore thumb; at least the guys could have added both a historical and horror-themed depth to it in order to match their name, and to compensate for the complete lack of musical merits. I don’t know, maybe in some other, machines and robots-dominated dimension, devoid of all feelings and emotions, this effort could strike a chord and also tear, or rather rip it deliberately with its insistent dispassionate, anti-music mechanics. Cause if that was the band’s ultimate purpose then it was mission accomplished on all counts.