In several respects, the story of the Brazilian metal act Sepultura is stranger (and more entertaining) than fiction. For starters, there’s the fairy-tale climb from third-world obscurity to international stardom. Then there’s the acrimonious departure of frontman Max Cavalera, on the final night of the band’s European tour supporting its most successful album, 1996’s Roots. With its popularity at an all-time high and trending upward, the split effectively derailed the band’s career in the States.
Then came one of music’s most intriguing sibling feuds. Max’s brother Iggor continued drumming in Sepultura for almost a decade; the brothers didn’t speak the entire time, instead communicating by trading barbs in the press. But by 2006 Iggor had finally had enough. He divorced his first wife, quit Sepultura and finally reached out to his estranged brother, a decision prompted in large part by the tragic death of Pantera guitarist (and onetime Sepultura tourmate) Dimebag Darrell.
Strangely, the Cavaleras never directly addressed the reasons for their separation. Instead, on Max’s urging, they immediately fell back into playing together again, forming the Cavalera Conspiracy — a caveman-metal take on raw, no-frills hardcore. Predictably enough, Cavalera Conspiracy set lists often featured Sepultura standards. But this year being Roots’ 20th, the Cavaleras are revisiting their legacy with a tour featuring start-to-finish performances of the album.
Sepultura’s defining work, Roots, still stands as arguably one of the most distinctive — and uncompromising — moments in heavy metal history. It’s an unprecedented fusion of metal with Latin rhythms; the riffs are prominently undercut with dense layers of ensemble percussion and field recordings of the indigenous Xavante people of Brazil’s interior. Still, Roots is a far cry from what you’d imagine “heavy metal world music” to sound like. In fact, Iggor and his then-Sepultura bandmates chafed at the “world music” tag and did their damndest to avoid it.
As teenagers weaned on pioneering headbangers like Venom, Slayer and Hellhammer, Sepultura (Portuguese for “grave” and pronounced SEH-ple-TURE-ah) initially turned their backs on the samba stylings their native country was celebrated for. But subtle shades of a distinct approach to rhythm lurk even in the endearingly amateurish clamor of their first release, 1985’s Bestial Devastation EP. And by their watershed 1993 album Chaos A.D., Sepultura could no longer hold back on influences that had been percolating all along.
“I’d always wanted to do a little more stuff with a Latin feel, Iggor tells the Scene via Skype, “but it took until Chaos A.D. to realize how we could make that into something that wasn’t too clichéd. That was always my fear. I’d been exposed to samba and the African Brazilian rhythms before I played the drums, and I’d always had a lot of caution about incorporating them in the right way, and not doing it for the sake of just having them there. It took us a lot of research and time to make sure that we did it in a way that felt completely natural. It wasn’t just like ‘OK, we like this and it makes sense, so let’s just do it.’ It took a lot to develop.”
Indeed, if you retrace Sepultura’s career through classic titles like 1987’s Schizophrenia, 1989’s Beneath the Remains, and 1991’s Arise, the band more or less charts a traditional course through established forms like black metal, thrash, death metal and progressive metal. Before Chaos A.D., the overwhelming majority of metal had a “white” feel to it. Sepultura changed that forever. And with Roots, the band went a step further, asserting once and for all that the genre can accommodate native stylings from any culture, much like jazz had done for decades prior.
It’s important to note that when Sepultura first entertained the idea of incorporating native Brazilian textures, the band members were as unfamiliar with Brazil’s indigenous population as as many of their listeners may have been. But in 1995, along with producer Ross Robinson (then hot off helming nu-metal pioneers Korn’s debut LP), they embarked on a historic trip to the home of the Xavante, located on a remote savanna in western Brazil. Iggor looks back on the trip as a life-changing experience.
“Every second of that trip was insane in a very inspiring way,” he recalls. “But there’s a few things that really stand out. Like when they explained to us that the only way they wrote music was if someone in the tribe dreamed of the music. They couldn’t just write a lyric or a melody. It has to be transmitted to them in a dream. From a musician’s point of view, it was like, ‘Wow, this is a completely different way of approaching music.’ ”
Iggor explains that by the time the band and Robinson reconvened at the Indigo Ranch studio in Malibu, Calif., they had an overabundance of material, and found themselves faced with the problem of keeping it from becoming “a gigantic jam that didn’t turn into actual songs.
“It was quite a difficult record to finish,” Iggor explains. ”We did so much recording that the amount of stuff we had going on was quite crazy. We had to make sure not to let anything really special slip by. It was tricky to go through all of it, and it took a lot of time to find out what would work with what we were already writing.”
For the fans who incessantly clamor for a Sepultura reunion in Blabbermouth and YouTube comment sections, seeing Roots performed by the Cavaleras (now touring as Max and Iggor Cavalera, but with a lineup that still includes Conspiracy guitarist Marc Rizzo and bassist Johny Chow) won’t completely scratch their itch. But those who attend — Thursday at Exit/In — will get to see songs from the album that Sepultura never played live. And, Iggor reveals, he and his brother have stipulated that the encores have to be from the Roots sessions.
So does that mean the audience will be treated to B-sides like bile-drenched covers of Celtic Frost’s “Procreation of the Wicked” and Bob Marley’s “War”?
“I’m not sure yet,” Iggor teases, “but something like that might fall into the set.”
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