Cavalera Australian Tour Starts This Week…
‘The closest thing you’re going to get to being there in 1984 is come to the Third World trilogy show and to be part of that! It’s a full on energy driven show, full of adrenaline all the way through. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t let up, man. It’s just like it’s an incredible amount of power goes into the show. At the end of the show, I’m totally exhausted every night. I’m just done. I got to go lay down!”
Max Cavalera, Brazilian metal legend of countless bands including Sepultura, Nailbomb, Soulfly and Killer Be Killed to name some, exclaims in preparation for Cavalera’s – the band of his family – upcoming Australian tour. The concept, much like two previous incarnations, focusses on a section of Sepultura’s back catalogue however this time, Max, flanked by brother and former Sepultura drummer Igor, re-recorded the releases for the modern day. It does raise the question why though?
‘Those are the records that we felt needed to showcase the sound properly. They’re great songs and they’re great records, but they’re very badly recorded because of the situation we were in with the Brazilian studios without money and producers. The best that we came up with was that at that time but I think our own original vision for those albums and songs are different than what came out. So, we had the chance of years later to go back to the studio and redo them with a great guitar sound, with a great drum sound with a professional producer, but keeping all the aggression. It is still dirty, aggressive, pissed off and angry and the heart of the thing is intact. So, I think that the coolest thing about these recordings was actually how to go back in time, grab something that was done forty years ago, make them sound relevant right now, but still have the same spirit of the original.’
Those original recordings were driven by Max and his brother, so it’s now forty years on and another Cavalera joins the sessions.
‘We had the chance, me and Igor, to do that and then we got to involve a new generation of players like my son Igor and Travis Stone. They come with the new blood of the newer metal that’s been done right now in the underground. The clash of generations and the chance to redo something that you did a long time ago that you weren’t totally happy with. Not many musicians get a chance to do that.’
The tour has already rolled through Europe and North America and centre’s around the Sepultura releases, EP Bestial Devastation, and albums Morbid Visions and Schizophrenia, the records that were re-recorded.
‘A lot of songs came to life last year on tour. ‘Septic Schizo’, ‘Inquisition Symphony’ and ‘Funeral Rights’ and even the unreleased songs, I think it changed from night to night my favourite songs. I did realise that some of the songs that were deep cuts on the record that we’d never even played them live back in the day. They’re actually really cool songs that will get you play live now.’
‘The cool thing about those records, they didn’t really have the later Sepultura stuff, the hit singles, ‘Refuse And Resist’ and ‘Roots Bloody Roots’, a song above everything else. Back in the day, maybe ‘Troops Of Doom’ was a little bit like that, but everything else, they all are from the same pot. So yeah, I feel that even now, even on this tour, it might be another song that on any day I’ll be like, ‘oh, that was a great song tonight that felt really good tonight.’’
The re-recordings themselves mix modern production with the structure of the originals, it gives the listener the ability to hear the power of the riffs on the first two releases (which everyone concedes the sound is awful) and superior production on the latter release, Schizophrenia.
‘The main mission of this rerecording was to do that and I think we did it. I think a lot of fans love the re-recording’s. I myself, as a musician, I love it. I think a lot of songs came to life on these recordings. They were buried with shitty sound and when you listen to them on the re-recording stuff like ‘Mayhem’, From The Past Comes The Storms’, ‘To The Wall’ and ‘Septic Schizo’. They are amazing songs, man. It’s hard to believe that I wrote them when I was sixteen years old.’
‘We took it very seriously though. The hard part was there’s a human thing about changing. You want to change so you have the originals. So, there is the temptation to change the songs and I had to resist that temptation. I told Igor that we don’t need to change these songs. They’re fucking great. There’s nothing wrong. They just need to be played better and to sound better. They don’t need to be modernised. They’re good as they were. We just play them better, execute them better, record them better with the same piss and vinegar attitude.’
One key factor this reviewer remembers from Schizophrenia especially, is the sound of the toms, something the band kept on the new recordings.
‘Well, that’s when it’s good to have a good memory. I reminded Igor of the toms. Toms are unique because they almost sound like tubes, they don’t sound like regular toms. It was funny because the engineer didn’t know about this and we told them that you have to put the microphone inside the toms, you have to take the skin from the bottom of the tom, put the microphone inside all the way on the inside of the tom and that’s how you get that almost like tubular sound. Those are things that the original has that we love and it was very important that we kept them.’
As the band name suggests, it’s all about family and now to have three on board – there are others in Cavalera clan with musical chops – it’s only fitting the last word goes there.
‘It’s great, it’s cool because it’s already kind of a family thing. I got my brother in the band and if you would ask me when I was a young kid in Brazil, you’re going to do this with your own kid one day, you’re going to play these songs with your kid, you are out of your mind. That’s never going to happen. But yeah, it did happen and it’s great. It’s a cool feeling.’
Interview By Iain McCallum
Catch Cavalera on tour on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…
