Brasil

These heroic veterans may as well have the longest-running album string on the Brazilian metal circuit. However, their beginnings were firmly in the punk/hardcore arena, violent angry hymns that filled in their first three full-lengths, the guys giving all the practitioners from the NYHC wave a very good, exhausting run for their money.

Comes the album here and sees out friends outgrowing their roots, but not by much. This is vehement hyper-active thrash that will make you cringe more than just now and then, filling you with memories of outrageous landmarks like Slayer’s “Reign in Blood”, Kreator’s “Pleasure to Kill”, and Dark Angel’s “Darkness Descends”. We have a bit over half an hour music on offer, with 18 numbers peppering the aether, with very few of those going over the 2-min mark. Some serious bracing is required for the listener to last through this raging downpour with a cut after cut lashing mercilessly, the angry shouty vocals leading the show with unheard-of belligerent passion. Nods (the hardcore roller-coasters “Aids, Pop Repression” and “Gil Coma”) at their earlier, more stripped-down recordings are inevitable, but the actual surprises are served on those mentioned longer pieces (“Law of Silence”) where the band display some admirable musical proficiency with a wider array of tools, going beyond the all-out mosh for a bit. “Drink til You Die” is an unexpectedly friendly crossover sing-alonger, but elsewhere such gentility isn’t encountered, the guys racing with the speed of light at every opportunity.

For an unrelenting slab of sheer musical aggression one would hardly come across something more fitting. This is a very speedy hyper-active journey that will leave you with one wide smile on the face once it’s over; a needed therapy for venting out anger, frustration, depression, and other similar negative emotions. The good piece of news is that the follow-up “Anarkophobia” is woven with the same uncompromising mindset involved; there’s some elaboration on the mentioned more serious arrangements, but the main no-bars-held fast-paced frame is far from ruined.

"Just Another Crime in Massacreland" saw the band return to their more simplistic hardcore roots, a territory they stayed for nearly 20 years when “Seculo Sinistro” (2014) brought back the thrashy patterns with full force for the creation of the band’s most brutal work to date. Yes, Brasil got talent, and it would take way more than just the requisite amount of luck for the newcomers to sidestep and outplay this age-old force of nature.