Sepultura - Morbid Visions
On November 10, 1986, "Morbid Visions", the debut album by the band "Sepultura", was released.
To understand the explosive power of "Morbid Visions"," one must go back to Brazil in the early 1980s, a country that was taking its first breaths of freedom after two decades of rigid military rule, a deep economic crisis, and cultural isolation from the West. The story of the musical monster from Belo Horizonte began with a severe family tragedy that changed the lives of brothers Max Cavalera and Igor Cavalera beyond recognition. Their father, Italian diplomat Graziano Cavalera, unexpectedly died of a heart attack and left the family destitute, forcing the mother and Ania to move with her children from São Paulo to their grandmother's house in the industrial city of Belo Horizonte. Shortly thereafter, the two younger brothers were taken by their cousin to the Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo to witness the historic, huge performance by the band "Queen" in 1981, a moving experience that ignited a fire in them. When the brothers began discovering records by "Black Sabbath", "Iron Maiden" and "Motörhead", which had been smuggled into Brazil like forbidden treasures, they realized that heavy music was not just an escape from the harsh reality, but a real life calling.
In 1984, when they were only fourteen and fifteen years old, the Cavalera brothers dropped out of school and decided to form a band that would be heavier, faster and scarier than anything heard in South America up to that point. The name "Sepultura", which means grave in Portuguese, was born one day when Max sat down with a Portuguese-English dictionary and tried to translate word for word the lyrics of the song "Dancing on Your Grave" from the album "Another Perfect Day" by "Motörhead". After a quick change of musicians in which original vocalist Wagner Lamounier left to form the extreme cult band "Sarcófago", Max took the position of vocalist and guitarist, Igor sat behind the drum kit, and they were joined by bassist Paulo Jr. and lead guitarist Jairo Guedz, then known by his stage name Tormentor. The young quartet eagerly absorbed the first wave of extreme metal from Europe and the United States through the exchange of tapes by mail with fans around the world, drawing direct inspiration from bands such as "Venom", "Celtic Frost", "Hellhammer", "Slayer", "Kreator" and "Possessed".
The turning point that catapulted the band from the local underground to the national consciousness came thanks to the small record store "Cogumelo" in Belo Horizonte, which decided to start an independent label to document the city's burgeoning extreme metal scene. In December 1985, "Sepultura" released the joint EP "Bestial Devastation" with the band "Overdose", which was recorded in primitive conditions with almost no budget, but sold over five thousand copies in just a few months through word of mouth. The surprising success convinced the label owners to give the young band a budget to record their first full-length studio album. In August 1986, the four boys entered the "Estúdio Vice Versa" studios in Belo Horizonte, with only seven days and a sixteen-track recording device, to capture their raw, unbridled fury.
The recording conditions for the album were light years away from the standards of metal studios in the United States or Europe, and the technical ignorance of the young band members created some of the most recognizable and magical features of the record. In those days, the four members did not even know that an electronic tuning device for guitars existed, so they tuned their instruments by ear only before each take. As a result, every time Guadez or Cavallera came in to record an additional guitar layer or solo over the accompaniment channels, the tuning changed slightly, creating a jarring, dark and chaotic dissonance that gives the album an authentic sense of horror that no modern studio effect can recreate. The lyrics, which dealt with apocalyptic visions, war, death and occultism inspired by horror films and the Swiss band "Celtic Frost", were written by Max with the help of a dictionary because none of the band members spoke fluent English at the time. Although the album cover credits Paulo Jr., all of the bass parts in the studio were actually recorded by guitarist Jairo Guadez to save valuable studio time.
The original vinyl album opens theatrically and chillingly with the monumental "O Fortuna" from the cantata "Carmina Burana" by German composer Carl Orff, an opening that was removed from later CD editions for copyright reasons. From the dramatic chorus erupts the title song "Morbid Visions", a brutal manifesto that opens with a fast, sawing guitar riff before sixteen-year-old Igor Kavalera storms the drums in a dizzying rhythm, while his brother Max roars in a throaty, distorted throaty vocal that laid the foundations for an entire generation of death and black metal singers in real time. Immediately after "Mayhem continues the frontal attack with sudden tempo changes, wild tribal drumming that sounds like a rock avalanche, and a chaotic guitar solo that tears through the speakers.
The undisputed pinnacle of the album and the song that has become a timeless classic in the band's performances over the decades comes in the third track, "Troops of Doom". The song opens with an iconic, slow, heavy and menacing riff that is directly influenced by "Black Sabbath" and "Celtic Frost", before accelerating into a sweeping and precise thrash-metal attack that first demonstrates the phenomenal writing talent of the group from Brazil. The song gained such mythological status that the band re-recorded it four years later on the album "Schizophrenia" to give it a more polished production, and its name even served as inspiration for the metal band that original guitarist Guadez founded decades later.
The first half of the record closes with "War", a fast and dark song that depicts a vision of total nuclear annihilation and combines the punkish speed of the band "Discharge" with the aggression of the German thrash scene. The second side opens with "Crucifixion", one of the darkest and most sinister tracks on the album, where Max's out-of-tune guitars and echoing vocals create a claustrophobic atmosphere of a fog-shrouded cemetery, as Igor's unrestrained drum passages float above them, demonstrating an unimaginable physical strength even at a young age.
The extreme flame continues to burn in "Show Me the Wrath", a short, compressed, lightning-fast track in which the band races forward without a break, leading to "Funeral Rites", a song that presents a more complex and convoluted structure with transitions between fast galloping rhythms and heavy, slow interludes that hint at the direction the band will develop in their next albums. The album closes with "Empire of the Damned", a brutal and merciless climax that concentrates all the passion, rage, and explosive youthful energy of four boys who refused to accept their fate on the fringes of the Third World.
The album's visual package was completed by the famous cult cover painted by Brazilian artist Eduardo Albardo, depicting a monstrous demon with bat wings and claws against a backdrop of gloomy rocks. This album also marked the debut of the iconic angular logo of "Sepultura", designed by Max Cavalera himself in his school notebook, a logo that accompanied the band on all of its masterpiece albums in the 1980s and 1990s. Shortly after the release of the album and the accompanying tour in Brazil, guitarist Jairo Guedes decided to leave the band on good terms, having lost interest in extreme metal, which paved the way for the joining of virtuoso guitarist Andreas Kisser from São Paulo and completing the classic line-up that would conquer the world.
Looking back, few albums in the history of metal have managed to capture so purely and unmediated the moment when a new genre was born out of chaos. Despite its underground sound and technical immaturity, and sometimes precisely because of them, "Morbid Visions" became a cornerstone of South American metal and a huge inspiration for the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s, with musicians from bands like "Mayhem" and "Darkthrone" often citing the Brazilians' early album as one of the direct sources of inspiration for their raw and dark sound. In 2023, brothers Max and Igor Cavalera came full circle when they re-recorded the album in its entirety under the name "Cavalera", proving that even after four decades, the songs they wrote as fearless boys in Belo Horizonte remain pure explosive in the history of heavy rock.
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