Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World (1984–1991)

It is not down in any map; true places never are.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Four chapters in, this history has been the story of two countries. California and New York built the records, the Ruhr valley built the reply, and both scenes had the same quiet advantages: shops that stocked imports, clubs that would take a chance on a Thursday night, labels within driving distance and a postal service that worked. That is where the previous chapter left off, with Essen and Düsseldorf arguing about who was faster.

Now take all of it away. Take away the record shop, the label, the club, the affordable guitar and the reliable post. What is left is a fifteen year old in a country with an import ban and triple digit inflation, listening to a fourth generation cassette of an album he will never own, working the riff out by ear because the sleeve is a photocopy of a photocopy and there is nobody within a thousand miles to ask. Between 1984 and 1991 that fifteen year old, in Belo Horizonte and Jonquière and Nottingham and Nagoya and Sydney, made some of the most extreme music of the decade.

This is the chapter about everywhere else. The bands in it learned how thrash metal was born from tape hiss rather than from ticket stubs, and what they got wrong in the copying turned out to be the interesting part. Distance is not a disadvantage in this music. It is a production credit.

The tape in the envelope

None of it happens without the post office. By 1984 there was an amateur distribution network running across four continents, built out of nothing but blank cassettes, photocopiers and stamps, and it moved music faster than any record company of the period could. The mechanism was simple. A fanzine printed a demo review with the band's home address underneath. Readers wrote to that address, or to the trading lists in the back pages of Metal Forces in England and Bob Muldowney's Kick Ass Monthly in New Jersey, enclosing an international reply coupon or a couple of dollars folded inside carbon paper so the envelope would not be opened for cash. Back came a C60 with a hand lettered inlay and a list of forty other addresses.

What travelled was not only music. Set lists travelled, logos travelled, guitar tunings and drum patterns travelled, and so did the assumption that this was a movement rather than a genre. A tape recorded in a rehearsal room in São Paulo in March could be in a bedroom in Newcastle by May and in a shop window in Tokyo by August, which is why bands who had never met arrived at similar records in the same eighteen months. It also meant every copy was worse than the last. Fourth generation dubs lose the top end first, then the bass, and what survives is the middle: the riff, the snare and the shouting. Several of the scenes in this chapter were built by people imitating a signal that had already been half destroyed, and they wrote to match what they could hear.

Several of these scenes were built by people imitating a signal that had already been half destroyed, and they wrote to match what they could hear.

What a record cost in Belo Horizonte

Brazil in the mid eighties was not a country you could simply order records into. A protectionist import regime, tightened through the decade and best known for the market reserve on computer equipment, made most foreign manufactured goods either impossible to import commercially or expensive enough to be theoretical. Inflation did the rest. The Cruzado plan froze prices on 28 February 1986 and had come apart inside a year, the monthly rate back at 16.8 per cent by January 1987, and by the end of the decade the annual figure was running in four figures. An imported LP, on the rare occasion one of the handful of dealers who could get them had one, cost more than a teenager could raise, which is a way of saying that a teenager owned three records and had heard three hundred.

Gear was worse. Brazilian guitars from Giannini and Del Vecchio were what existed, and a Marshall stack was a rumour. Sepultura's early equipment stories have been retold often enough to have become folklore, but the documented ones are worse than the folklore. Igor Cavalera has said that in 1984 he did not own a kit at all, only a snare, a floor tom and a cymbal nailed to a broom handle, and that the first proper drums he played were borrowed from Overdose. Most of the instruments on Bestial Devastation were borrowed from friends. The point is not the hardship. The point is what it did to the music. If your guitar will not hold a clean tone and your cymbals are cracked, you do not write a Bay Area record with harmonised leads. You write something that survives being played badly on bad equipment in a hot room, and the whole first wave of Brazilian metal sounds like that on purpose.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Cogumelo Records and the Cavalera brothers

Belo Horizonte is an inland city of hills in Minas Gerais, several hundred miles from the coast and from the São Paulo music industry. It had one thing the coast did not: a record shop called Cogumelo, trading since 1980, which sold imports and in 1985 decided to press its own. The first Cogumelo Records release was a split shared by two local bands, the label became the home of the whole local scene, and its catalogue over the second half of the decade is the reason we are still talking about the city.

Sepultura formed there in 1984 around two brothers, Max and Igor Cavalera, teenagers who had lost their father the year before and who took the band's name from a Portuguese translation of a Motörhead song title. Their first release was a split LP shared with their Belo Horizonte neighbours Overdose in 1985. Sepultura's side was called Bestial Devastation, and it is five tracks of Venom worship played at a speed the band could not entirely control, with reverb applied to everything including the mistakes. It is not a good record. It is an unmistakable one.

The debut album, Morbid Visions, followed on Cogumelo in 1986 with Jairo Guedes on lead guitar. It is faster, blacker and no better recorded, and "Troops of Doom" is the first Sepultura song that works from the first bar to the last. Then Guedes left to play something more conventional, and the replacement changed the arithmetic. Andreas Kisser came from São Paulo, was a properly technical player who had learned from the American records rather than around them, and he arrived in time for Schizophrenia, cut at J. G. Estúdio in Belo Horizonte in August 1987 and released by Cogumelo that October. That album is where the band stops sounding like a rumour of thrash metal and starts sounding like a thrash band with better riffs than most of the people they had been copying. "Inquisition Symphony" is a seven minute instrumental in a scene that did not do instrumentals.

Sarcófago, Vulcano and the wing that went further

The other Belo Horizonte bands did not want to get better. They wanted to get worse, on purpose, and in doing so they invented a great deal of what black metal would look like a decade later. Cogumelo's Warfare Noise I compilation, out on 30 November 1986, introduced four of them at once: Chakal, Holocausto, Mutilator and Sarcófago.

Sarcófago were fronted by Wagner Lamounier, who had been Sepultura's first singer, left in March 1985 without ever recording an album with them, and wrote the words to "Antichrist" on Bestial Devastation before he went. He left on terms bad enough that the feud outlived the decade. Their debut I.N.R.I., released by Cogumelo in 1987, is played at a tempo the drummer cannot quite sustain and is all the better for it, and the sleeve photograph of four young men in white face paint, bullet belts, spikes and inverted crosses was circulating through the tape network years before anyone in Norway posed for anything similar. Norwegian musicians said so afterwards, repeatedly and without much prompting.

Down on the coast the story was older. Vulcano, from Santos in São Paulo state, had been going since 1981, and the Devil on My Roof demo in 1984, the Live! album in 1985 and the studio record Bloody Vengeance on Rock Brigade in 1986 give them a genuine claim to being early at almost everything Brazilian extreme metal is credited with. São Paulo itself produced Korzus and Ratos de Porão, the latter a hardcore band formed in 1981 whose Crucificados Pelo Sistema arrived in 1984 and who spent the rest of the decade moving steadily toward the place where thrash met hardcore. Rio contributed Dorsal Atlântica. None of these bands could tour outside their own state cheaply, so the scene grew as a correspondence rather than a circuit.

Nas Nuvens: Beneath the Remains and the way out

Roadrunner Records was a Dutch company operating out of Amsterdam, and its American A and R man Monte Conner heard Schizophrenia through the usual channels and signed Sepultura in 1988. The label sent the producer Scott Burns, who had been building the Florida death metal sound at Morrisound in Tampa, to Rio de Janeiro to record the next album at Nas Nuvens. The sessions ran from 15 to 28 December 1988, eight in the evening until five in the morning because those were the hours the studio could spare, on a budget of around eight thousand dollars with Burns taking two thousand of it, and with a band who spoke limited English and a producer who spoke no Portuguese.

Beneath the Remains came out in the spring of 1989 and is the best thrash album made anywhere that year. The title track spends ninety seconds on clean guitars before it detonates; "Inner Self" and "Mass Hypnosis" are as good as anything the Bay Area was writing by then, and better recorded than most of it. What separates the record from its American contemporaries is rhythmic weight. Igor Cavalera plays behind the beat in a way no American thrash drummer did, dragging the snare a fraction late so the riffs sound heavier than they are fast, and that habit is the seed of the groove metal the band would grow into on Arise in 1991 and leave thrash for afterwards.

Igor Cavalera drags the snare a fraction late, so the riffs sound heavier than they are fast.

The detail worth keeping is this. Sepultura were the first band from outside Europe and North America that the metal industry treated as a headline act rather than a curiosity, and they got there in five years from a split LP recorded on borrowed amplifiers. Almost every non western metal band that followed cites them, which is a heavier inheritance than the records alone.

Canada: Voivod and the Québec anomaly

Canada's claim starts earlier than anyone's outside the United States. Exciter, from Ottawa, put "World War III" on Mike Varney's Shrapnel compilation U.S. Metal Vol. II in 1982, got a deal out of it, and released Heavy Metal Maniac in June 1983, recorded the previous August at The Dungeon in Aylmer, Québec. It is one of the first speed metal albums anybody made, which is as far as that claim can honestly be pushed. They were then more or less ignored while the Americans took the credit, which is a pattern this chapter repeats.

The stranger case is Voivod, formed in 1982 in Jonquière, a mill town in the Saguenay region of Québec, several hundred kilometres north of Montréal and about as far from a metal scene as North America allows. Four francophone teenagers, Denis Bélanger, Denis D'Amour, Jean-Yves Thériault and Michel Langevin, built a band out of Venom, Discharge and Motörhead records, an invented science fiction mythology and drawings by the drummer. War and Pain arrived on Metal Blade in 1984 sounding like a building coming down.

What happened next is the most interesting evolution in this chapter. Rrröööaaarrr in 1986 is still mostly noise. Killing Technology, made for Noise in 1987, is thrash metal with the chord vocabulary replaced, all dissonant intervals and lurching time, and Dimension Hatröss in 1988 pushes it further into a concept record about a machine consciousness. By Nothingface in 1989, released through MCA and built around a Pink Floyd cover, the band had stopped being a thrash act altogether and had become the first progressive band the thrash audience took seriously. It reached number 114 on the Billboard 200, the only Voivod album ever to enter an American chart. Distance had let them misread the genre for seven years, and the misreading was the point.

Canada: Toronto, Guelph and Jeff Waters

The rest of English Canada was blunter. Razor, from Guelph in Ontario, released Executioner's Song in April 1985 and Evil Invaders that October through Viper, the metal arm of the Canadian label Attic, and Evil Invaders in particular is thirty eight minutes of unornamented speed with a singer who sounds genuinely irritated. They got out of the contract in 1987 and moved to the Toronto independent Fringe Product. Sacrifice, from Toronto, made Torment in Fire in 1986 and Forward to Termination in 1987, the second of which is a considerably better record than its reputation and stands up beside the German albums of the same year. Infernal Majesty, also from Toronto, made one album, None Shall Defy, released by Roadrunner in 1987, and were dropped by the label soon afterwards despite the reviews. Nothing else of theirs surfaced until Displeased reissued the record in 1998.

Canada's commercial breakthrough came late and from one man. Jeff Waters wrote, recorded and largely played Annihilator's Alice in Hell, released by Roadrunner in 1989 with Randy Rampage, formerly of the Vancouver punk band D.O.A., shouting over the top of it. It is a technical record made by a guitarist who had clearly worked out exactly what Megadeth were doing and decided to do more of it, and "Alison Hell" gave Canada a thrash song that got played on television. Never, Neverland followed in 1990 and sold better still, by which point the genre's American flagships were already in retreat.

Britain, Japan, Australia and the long tail

Britain is the awkward one. The country that supplied the raw material, and whose press coined the words, produced almost no thrash bands until the American records were four years old. Onslaught, from Bristol, started in 1982 as a punk band and turned metal by degrees: Power from Hell in 1985 is barely competent, The Force in 1986 on Under One Flag is a real record, and by In Search of Sanity the band had signed to London Records, recorded the album with Sy Keeler and then been made to scrap every vocal and redo it with Steve Grimmett of Grim Reaper. It came out in April 1989, reached number 30 in Britain, and lost the thread.

Sabbat, from Nottingham, were better and stranger. Martin Walkyier wrote about pre Christian Britain and folklore at a density no metal singer had attempted, Andy Sneap played the riffs and later became one of the genre's most used producers, and History of a Time to Come in 1988 and Dreamweaver in 1989, both for Noise, are the two British thrash albums worth owning without qualification. Xentrix from Preston were the tidy ones, technically excellent on Shattered Existence in 1989 for Roadrunner, and are unfairly best remembered for a 1990 Ghostbusters cover single whose first sleeve used the film's no ghost logo without permission, was withdrawn, and came back with different artwork. Around them sat Acid Reign, Slammer, D.A.M. and Atomkraft, mostly on Under One Flag, mostly two years late.

Elsewhere the map fills in quickly. Switzerland had Coroner, three Zürich musicians who had worked as crew for Celtic Frost and who made Punishment for Decadence in 1988 and No More Color in 1989, as technical as anything in America and colder than all of it. Denmark had Artillery, whose By Inheritance in 1990 used Middle Eastern scales a decade before that became a habit. The Netherlands, home of Roadrunner itself, produced Pestilence, whose Malleus Maleficarum in 1988 begins as thrash and ends as something else. Italy had Bulldozer and Necrodeath, Poland had Kat and later Acid Drinkers, and behind the eastern border the state labels pressed so little metal that the tape network was not a preference but the only distribution that existed.

Japan came at it from a different angle again. Sabbat of Kuwana, an hour west of Nagoya, no relation to the Nottingham band and two years older than it, stayed deliberately underground for decades. Almost everything they put out came through Gezol's own Evil Records, a run of seven inch singles from 1985 onwards before the first album Envenom in 1991, and the records sit closer to Venom and Mercyful Fate than to the Bay Area. Doom, formed in Tokyo in 1985, took the technical route, with Koh Morota's fretless bass so far forward on No More Pain in 1987 that the songs reorganise themselves around it. Outrage, also from Nagoya, were the ones a major label eventually took. Japanese import prices ran the other way from Brazil's, high but payable, and the country became the market that kept second tier thrash bands solvent through the nineties by buying their records after everyone else had stopped.

Australia had the distance problem in its purest form. Mortal Sin in Sydney paid for Mayhemic Destruction themselves in 1986 and put it out on their own Mega Metal Productions, then watched Vertigo pick it up for the world a year later and got as far as touring Europe before the line up came apart. Face of Despair followed on Vertigo in 1989, cut in Sydney with the American producer Randy Burns and mixed in Los Angeles, which tells you what it cost an Australian band to be taken seriously. Hobbs' Angel of Death in Melbourne made one album for Steamhammer in 1988, recorded at Musiclab in Berlin with Harris Johns, and became a cult item everywhere except at home, and Slaughter Lord never released a studio album at all, existing entirely as demos passed hand to hand, which is the most complete expression of everything this chapter is about.

By 1991 the network that made all of this possible was ending. Sepultura were on major label distribution and touring America, Voivod were on MCA, Annihilator were on television, and the fanzine addresses that had connected a record shop in Belo Horizonte to a bedroom in Nagoya were being replaced by real deals and, shortly after, by something faster than either. What the isolated years produced cannot be repeated: a dozen scenes that heard the same records badly, in different rooms, each one getting a different genre out of the mistake.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Beneath the Remains
• Wikipedia: Cogumelo Records
• Wikipedia: Sarcofago
• Wikipedia: Vulcano (band)
• Wikipedia: Nothingface (Voivod album)
• Wikipedia: Mortal Sin (band)