A-Lex

Derrick Green is a nutter. His forced harsh yelling should be at home with the foul guitar tone and fast tempos, but they aren't. They have never been essential or compatible with the unchanged bro-groove the band has stuck with for release after release. From the thrashier "Moloko Mesto" to the immediate switch back to groove-dom in "Filthy Rot", Green's Fear Factory-copied spits, barks, and attempts at cleans suck the passion out of anything the rest of the music is attempting to do.

Then again, whatever the music tries to accomplish is almost always in vain anyway. What derails Sepultura's progression back into thrash territory is this inherent need to imitate angst and stick with the underground by putting on this fake fuck the system act. They pull this off by rehashing the exact same ideas since Roots with typically one or two mediocre riffs within the same inbred extended family of riffs as "jumpdafuckup" (with a little more metal sprinkled over it). The guitar tone is usually charred and fat, as it is here with some added polish like Dante XXI. The bass always follows suit since it dropped trying to be funky, instead going for complete heaviness under the guitars. The whole sound is dirty, simplistic, and unexciting, going on forever and ever because Sepultura pad their albums with so many songs.

Songs like "What I Do!" wouldn't be god awful if the band pursued the middle eastern type of melodies with proper songwriting. But everything boils down to the same clamoring drums and churning guitars with Green's retarded yelling. From a very skewed view this album also achieves a crust punk sound like with "Metamorphosis" and "Paradox", but once more this is dependent on the listener and the band fails to take advantage of it. Actually, Sepultura never ditched their lifeless brand of hardcore when Green was added. The difference is that Dante XXI tip-toed into metallic hardcore while A-Lex rummages through bad riffs and worse songs as it tries to capture the same apocalyptic atmosphere.

This album can't be a disappointment after a large run of awful Sepultura albums. From the new drummer's misplaced energy to the stock songwriting to the recycled riffs and polished production, this band has made another worthless album. There are very few levels of the experimentation that kept these albums even a little intriguing to some. Better to prefer the straightforward songs than that experimentation, though, or else the band gets cocky and records something like "Ludwig Van" - a miserable attempt at fusing bad groove with "9th Symphony" and having it go absolutely nowhere. A-Lex, congratulations on existing with no purpose except confirming Sepultura's continuing suckage.