Band : Sepultura
Album title : A-Lex
Label : Steamhammer
Distributor : SPV - CNR
Release date : 26/01/2009
Release : CD

In all honesty, I kinda lost track of Brazilian top act Sepultura after the departure of their frontman Max Cavalera in 1996! Still, the remaining trio of drummer Igor Cavalera, bassist Paulo Xisto, and guitarist Andreas Kisser did return to the fore soon after with American singer Derrick Green (who’d previously fronted Overfriend, Alpha Jerk, and Outface) and their 1998 album Against, an album which was a nice continuation of their tribal-rooted Metal. Further outings from the band would be 2001’s Nation (which I came across thanks to my work for Concrete Web, but as that was only during the tedious job of having to transcribe an interview from a tape recording, I didn’t really give it the attention it might’ve deserved), the 2002 covers EP Revolusongs, 2003’s Roorback, and 2006’s concept album Dante XXI (to be quite complete I should also mention November 2005’s double-CD Live In São Paulo, which was also released as double DVD). In January 2006 Igor Cavalera announced a temporary leave of absence to concentrate on family life, just having become father to a boy. He would be temporarily  replaced by Roy Mayorga (of Thorn, Crisis, and Soulfly repute), but by June Jean Dolabella (formerly of Udora) had taken over the drum stool.

Apparently, the band members had gotten fascinated by the book A Clockwork Orange, written in 1962 by Anthony Burgess (most of us will know the story through the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same title), and they decided to build their new album around that. Yeah, you’ve guessed it, A-Lex is again a concept album! Based on the book rather than on the movie (which misses the concluding part in which main character Alex comes to the insight of how to make a change in his life for the better), the album is divided in 4 parts, each beginning of which starts with an instrumental (“A-Lex I” – representing the initiation to the story with all its aggression, “A-Lex II” – representing the imprisonment and conditioning of the main character, “Alex III” – the pat where he works towards his revenge, and “Alex IV” – with the conclusion). Following also the atmosphere of the book, the music is alternated accordingly, the more psychedelic part where Alex is being conditioned expressed with the addition of keyboard sounds! One of the tracks which will be noticed the most, will definitely be the instrumental “Ludwig Van”, in which the band expresses Alex’ love/hate relation towards Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the aid of classically trained musicians from their hometown…making for a very nice meltpot of Metal and Classical music!

You can check a threesome of songs (“Moloko Mesto” and “We’ve Lost You!” from the first part of the book/ album, “The Treatment”, from the second) at myspace.com/sepultura, but really the album is something to be listened to as a whole, with the lyrics at hand (a luxury I didn’t have with the cardboard promo copy that was sent us, but which I certainly hope will be provided with the retail version). The band claims they’ve changed musically from their beginning days (a process which comes to àll musicians with the will to progress and better themselves, but sometimes scowled at by fans – a minority, I might add), and you can look at it any way you like, but when push comes to shove…and after having listened to the album…you too will have to admit that this is Sepultura’s best album since “Roots”! As far as I’m concerned, it can stand proudly in my collection next to that monumental album, without paling in the comparison! In other words, here’s a nice addition to that “Best Albums Of 2009”-list of mine!!!

In February the band starts on a tour which will take them mostly to the Eastern parts of Europe [Bulgaria, Roumania, Serbia, Austria (no less than 4 stops there altogether), the Czech Republic (also two shows), Poland, Germany (on the East front in the middle of the tour, then also in Essen towards the end of it), Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kroatia], but also to Holland (for 3 gigs) and finally to the Maximum HxC & Metal Festival in Colfontaine near Mons in Belgium! By the way, there’s a funny detail about the title of the album being spelled the way it is: “lex” is the Russian word for “law, and putting the “A-“ prefix to it makes it “no law”…heheh, delicious!!!

98/100

Tony.