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sepultura themediatorbetweenhead
Artist: Sepultura
Title: The Mediator between Head and Hands Must be the Heart
Genre: Thrash Metal
Release Date: 25th October 2013
Label: Nuclear Blast


Album Review

In 1927, when Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was made, the world seemed a much simpler place for the average newspaper reader of the West. There was a blooming of the economy and everyone seemed to put behind the horrors of the WWI and of the Spanish Flu. Hindsight makes even the fool look wise. As we all know this was a magic image; when you looked into the details there were unsettling sights. And with that there was Metropolis reflecting the fear of the revolution of the masses. In one of the most ambiguous and deeply unhistorical bits of the film there exists the big social compromise “the mediator between head and hands must be the heart!” I’ve always found this unfitting to the overall flow of the movie. One friend of mine once told me this joyful embracing between the workers and their masters was influenced by Lang’s wife who at the time was looking askance at the Nazis. Maybe...

But when SEPULTURA come along rehearsing the same message of reconciliation amidst fears of an upheaval during this summer’s World Cup, a blind urban revolution “beautified” by the typical leftist vagueness of “equality”, of massive poverty, organised crime, possible “World Cup courts”, football, sex, Sambadrome and Jesus of Rio de Janeiro, and one of the highest homicide rates of the world (27 per 100,000 when at the States it is 6 per 100,000) then you may start asking what is going on. Can a mediocre album such as this one, an album that can’t even distinguish between Atheism and anti-clericalism (‘The Age of the Atheist’) to describe more accurately the feeling of the Brazilian zeitgeist than on-the-spot reporters can? It seems so. Or maybe this brain salad of a lyric and profitable rage can spin off towards many directions, at your discretion of course.

In terms of music it’s nothing serious, or unheard-of. Typical Thrash rage and speed that, at times, manages to keep something from the old spirit of SEPULTURA alive. Maybe the collaboration with Dave Lombardo added something positive to the mix. But, when this album is compared with the older ones of SEPULTURA it doesn’t even go half-way to a recycled, teens-orientated version of ‘Refuse/Resist’. The only song that stands out with a right of its own is the ‘Grief’, a melancholic, slow-paced, anthem that should be included in SEPULTURA’s greatest moments. It seems that SEPULTURA’s favourite hobby is to beat dead horses from their shining throne of infinite humanism. And the problem isn’t that they don’t have Lang’s talent in Metropolis. What I’m afraid of is that their rebellion looks like a college clone of Ed Wood’s ‘Plan 9 of Outer Space’. Maybe the ‘Plan 13 of Urban Anarchism’.


Tracklist

01. Trauma of War
02. The Vatican
03. Impending Doom
04. Manipulation of a Tragedy
05. Tsunami
06. The Bliss of Ignorants
07. Grief
08. The Age of the Atheist
09. Obsessed
10. Da Lama Ao Caos


Line-up

Derrick Green - Lead Vocals
Andreas Kisser - Guitars
Paulo Jr. - Bass
Eloy Casagrande - Drums  


Websites

www.facebook.com/sepultura / sepultura.uol.com.br / www.nuclearblast.de/sepultura


Cover Picture

sepultura themediatorbetweenhead


Rating

Music: 5
Sound: 7
Total: 6 / 10





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