I.N.R.I.

When this was released it was practically open season for extreme metal to build upon itself. Outside of Brazil other countries had better distribution, equipment, means to record, established fan bases. With Sarcofago, you have to imagine they had limited and skimpy resources, yet they compensated in their own particular ways. Venom, Hellhammer, Sodom, Possessed, Bathory and other black-soul card carrying crew were at the right avenues to inspire these Brazilians, who used what little was available to them, and essentially took what was established in extreme metal at that point and brought it to another heinous level of intensity.

This raises a ruckus by mostly plowing forward, adding speed wherever they're capable. I can imagine them playing vicious enough in the rehearsal room prior to recording this that they're running on each other's used air. Essentially using a different form of collaboration where the instruments are enemies. Usually bands try to work in unison: basically a bass line might compliment a guitar line, the drums a particular fill to evolve the song, vocals that hand back and forth the reins. When they're pushing it to the limits with speed, Sarcofago's on the other hand fight to the death, ready to slit one another's throats, finding out who's the weakest link, and when you realize there isn't one or everybody's pushing just as hard, you're presented with a pack of tainted alpha males or just a lawless group of heathens, take your pick.

This will hit you broadside. Some albums feel long and unending, this feels sudden and unexpected like an off-road ride that just got hairy, repeatedly berating yourself that it's far too late to turn back to a safer stretch of terrain. Somewhere underneath all of that encroaching musical crudeness, 'INRI' on a basic level has the usual facets of story: unrelenting reasoning, flow that can be as feral as it is spelled backwards, prose that any nun would break her ruler over your head from. But here's where it completely breaks off: it's heroless. The starring roles are chock-full of antagonists. This is unlike even watching a horror movie that lets up by throwing out a joke for relief, or you let out a sigh when the killer gets it in the end—you won't find any of that here. In their personalities, Sarcofago spends less time on trying to be glamorous or productive rock stars in the sometimes superficial music world and more time on becoming enigmatic characters or destructive villains. With names like Butcher and D.D. Crazy they come across as old Batman comics with faces painted and a certain goon-like persona, but you can imagine them being flat-out rejected at the cutting room floor due to being too this or that, or just plain too over the top.

With their debut Sarcofago are ungracious hosts: they grunt and spit when they talk, your well-being at constant risk being in the same room as them, their typical '80's Brazilian sound sandblasts your ear drums, their English is atrocious, blunt and to the evil point. Through all of these little "setbacks," the kind where it could easily ruin any other band, it has an eternally likable clunky-clang to it. A way to explain their framework would be like rapidly putting together a puzzle where the image and construction was etched by a learned caveman. One piece can be roughly squeezed with the next and because of that some sections aren't perfect and might look off, but the strength of these recordings is the band throwing away most standard and conforming musical ideas out the window and still being capable of guiding the listener with their radiating energy and workable deviations from the norm. The process can resemble being in the heat of the moment, and if your heart or nerves don't give out before you're finished, you can hawk a loogie right back at them, or in your hand and secure a firm lasting handshake. They present the ageless establishment of relationship where a set of individuals exchange back and forth, except it looks more like take, take, take, give, take, take, take, give. You start to wonder if they are friend or foe, or just doing it solely for themselves. The kind of attitude that says something like, "Take it or leave it, like it or hate it, either way it will piss you off or you can just piss off."

The production on 'INRI' has frayed ends: ripped, torn, ragged. It sounds like it was recorded in a tin room or directly from the bowels of Hades, however you want to take it in. Though this is better sounding than some other Brazilian bands at the time, loud enough to be workable as each instrument comes through, and importantly I find it complimentary to the type of ideology they set out to portray. This album has a few simple, known-to-work positions and particular movements: crouching, hiding/stalking, at a trot, sprinting. Like a capable, though, primitive hunter who has deep murder in his eyes. The song writing was worked through prior, but when showing up to record it's as if a buzzer is about to go off before they have to stop, or they were going for a longer length but the studio gave the boot or their wallets ran dry. And I'm sure they went in with the mentality of something like: If bands like Genocide/Repulsion would take it thus far with acceleration, we'd take it further till we tipped over or our arms fell off. At most times they graze through notes and at others they slow it down and can be just as menacing. More than likely they were just grabbing hold of the slower sections of Hellhammer and adding more fuel to the fire. 'Satanic Lust' brings about tricks by starting out calm with simplistic repetitious chug then gives the treat with a break into speeding madness. 'Nightmare' is a song where the main guitar line is slow, basic and catchy, with some simplistic palm mutes thrown in for good measure. 'Christ's Death' heads down the speedway only to decelerate midway and still intimidate anyone who gets in its path; a riff initiates an ultra sluggish strum on a few notes before the music comes in and then multiple tortured screams rain from your speakers in peaked emotional hate and disgust. Mostly they're strict carnivores for the juiciest, bloodiest, piece of...riffs. Being practically inharmonious and still recallable, yet looking like something the cat dragged in: twisted, soiled, unmerciless; the kind where the curiously morbid part of your brain can't help but take a snap shot of it for later evaluation and exploration.

They have blastbeasts with enough force that they sound like two fast-forwarded, stiff-arms rapidly hammering nails—a metal against metal emulation. If you've ever gotten the speed settings on a record player wrong, basically making a fast band converted to hyper accelerated levels with the flick of a switch (or a tape deck with fast-forward and play pressed simultaneously), this would be like taking Sodom's 'Obsessed by Cruelty' or a similar album in extreme metal just before '87 and injecting it with a medicine cabinet full of uppers, flicking the conversion switch, and then seeing that same band's speed suddenly get veins-out-the-neck jacked with energy. Although Mr. D.D. Crazy couldn't evolve his chops in the drumming world anywhere near someone in the likes of Mike Portnoy, or more related with Dave Lombardo with his distinctly hard, varied, and well-rounded style, double D pushed the level further with the extremity side instead of true technique, and literally turned out to be one of the fastest and most ferocious snare bashers for the year. The vocalist makes himself sound as inhuman as possible with shouts, grunts and growls, having them peaked in intensity with effects drenched inside and out. This is before these type of vocals would become common place, before your Cannibal Corpses or Cannibal Clones, at a point when they came so out of left field that they could scare off the normal music listener who rightfully thought, "What in the hell was that?", and I feel after this many years later are still capable of treading, or more like trampling, on those same nerves of a new unsuspecting generation.

If the normal safe and secure, do-it-by-the-book person is wondering about leniency, mercy, pity, or conformity, graciousness, mass appeal—what of it? An objective of their's was to make you flinch. And they demand your attention, but are ultimately deserving of it; the kind of obnoxious person that gets a slap to get in line and returns an even harder slap right back. Sarcofago did it either unconsciously and not completely on purpose or consciously resisted the mainstream at every step, though whatever happened behind the scenes it likely wouldn't matter because most initially listening to this would be under the impression that the band never heard of a glide, leveling or a smooth landing, probably being one of the most chaotic pilots you've flown with, traveling through thunderstorms, rain, hail, low visibility, but in the end the worst they've done is upset some nerves and values, aid in deucing your pants, and although they still owe you $11.95 for making your lunch come up and out the wrong end, I applaud them each time I put this on for the hellish ride and near-death experience.