Morbid Visions/Bestial Devastation -
Sepultura
I know everyone is expecting me to hate this. I don't particularly love it, but I can see it as a kind of engaging instance of old school Death Metal, and when you consider that the guys were just learning English, well as a debut it could be worse. The production is **** though - Wiki tells me they forgot to tune their guitars, and it shows - and the whole thing seems very dense and more than a little raw. The vocals are really stilted, but again my friend Wiki reveals that they were actually translating word for word from Brazilian, so that can't have been easy: learning the language as you wrote about it. Got to give them points for effort. They could just have said "**** it: we'll sing in Portuguese" but they didn't.
As Batty says, most of the songs sound the same: I'd be hard pressed to take anything out of this and say "that was different". It all goes mile a minute, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think too much of the guitar work really, though I know they got better. The addition of the EP was really pointless, as it doesn't show any deviation from, or improvement on, the album, so it's basically just another twenty-odd minutes of mediocity to suffer through, and the opening "incantation" is painfully stupid.
Yes, I can certainly see the Black Metal influences here, and if Sepultura were a BM band I think I could forgive them more easily, particularly on a debut, but here it's really just a mess. You have to give them points for trying though, and as I say, they improved with time. I can also see the comparisons to
Hell Awaits, though this is more
Haunting the Chapel for me, while nowhere near as good.
Oh, and Batty, once again: I HAVE heard
Chaos AD, though not the other one. When I get a moment I'll try to listen to it. Still better than Tomb ****ing Mold though.
(It is actually two and a half, but I don't have half cleaver images, and it's better than a two-cleaver rating so...)