Year Of Metal #088: Sepultura - Beneath The Ruins

I should start by saying that I don’t mean this in any way as a dig when I say that Sepultura’s 1989 breakthrough third album Beneath The Remains is good. For thrash aficionados I don’t doubt it’s truly great, and while I’m by no means sufficiently versed on the subgenre, I get why it’s held up as a classic. It sounds fantastic, the playing’s top notch, there’s energy, aggression, and swagger to spare. I didn’t find the record boring like I do a lot of thrash, but I’d be hard pushed to say the album didn’t fade into the background at times, which I don’t think this kind of music is meant to.

For my $0.02, there’s one really cool song, “Inner Self”. This was the only time I really sat up and took notice when spinning the album, and a lot of folk evidently feel similarly, as it’s by a long way the most streamed track on Beneath The Ruins. I love the occasional ripples of mega creepy guitar, and the increasingly frenzied playing in the build up to a barn storming solo. The halfway turn into a quicker section is pretty commonplace in thrash, but it’s deployed well here, the machine gun rat-a-tat of the snare leading into the sprint.

The album on the whole sounds superb, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of Max Cavalera as a frontman - he’s got a punky, untuned bark to his vocals with real power, and he prioritises rhythm over any kind of melody to the point that I’m not entirely sure what language the Brazilian band are singing in. There are moments when the production is especially considered and interesting, like the closing moments of the opening title track - reverb starts to wash over the mix as the guitars pile up in squealing fashion. There are weird flourishes of character like the bizarre bass sequence at the end of “Stronger Than Hate” - it’s kind of tied on, but I like it all the same.

I don’t want to call the album workmanlike, because that really isn’t fair. Front to back, I enjoyed it, and it’s less repetitive and contained less filler than a lot of thrash I’ve consumed. There are bangers on here, like the jam packed “Slaves Of Pain”, which rushes through a wild, swooping solo between a couple of heavy hitting verses. But at no point was the material making me tune in fully or sit up and take notice. I imagine in a live setting this could be really cool - it absolutely gets your foot tapping and your head (mildly, in my case) banging. I’ve listened to another of their albums, Roots, which I think is considered their defining work along with this one, and I found a lot more to grab onto there. It’s an unfair comparison because Roots was all over the place, taking in world and Latin music as well as leaning towards nu metal, but it’s an illustration that Sepultura had plenty more to offer.

I made a note that this was a thrash album that washed over me and that I meant that mostly as a compliment, but I suppose that really isn’t complimentary any way you look at it. I get it, and maybe if I drilled the record a load more times so that the songs became more distinct, I could get into it, but in all honesty I’m probably not going to do that.