On 25 October 2013 Brazil's most travelled metal institution, Sepultura, put out its thirteenth studio album with a drummer who was twenty-two years old, and the drummer is the story. Recalled to the job for the first time since Roots, Ross Robinson set the band up in his own house in Venice, California, in the summer of 2013, threw out the click track along with the Pro Tools grid, and let them track The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart with nothing holding the tempo but the hands of Eloy Casagrande. The record tears the clock off the factory wall in its first minute. It never puts it back.
The title is a line from Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis, where the workers of the lower city feed a machine that swallows them by the shift, and the band chose its enemy accordingly. Andreas Kisser told The Rock Pit, in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth on 3 November 2013, that Robinson "didn't want the album to sound like a machine", and Derrick Green, speaking to Ghost Cult Magazine in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth on 2 October 2013, described the producer "in the room while we recorded our instruments literally pushing us physically." Nobody on this record coasts. The foreman saw to that.
Written in São Paulo by Kisser and Casagrande before Robinson heard a note, with Green's vocal lines and Paulo Jr.'s bass laid over a frame of guitar and drums and the whole thing mixed afterwards by Steve Evetts, this is the first Sepultura album with the young man who took the stool from Jean Dolabella in November 2011, and he plays like an apprentice handed the keys to the foundry on his first night who intends to melt down every ingot in the building. Fills land in every gap. Double kick arrives where a lesser record would idle, and the blast beats are rationed tightly enough to stay a threat. The veterans around him sound younger for it.
"Trauma of War" opens at a dead sprint, Kisser's riff all elbows and the drums shovelling coal into a boiler that is already glowing, a straight thrash opener with no ceremony at all. "The Vatican" has ceremony to spare. Church bells and a choir lead in through an orchestral prelude written by keyboard player Renato Zanuto, and then blast beats and double kick hammer the altar rail flat for the hardest six and a half minutes on the record, made in a year Green summed up, in the same Ghost Cult interview, with "a new pope elected" while the populace, as he put it, was "clamouring for hospitals and schools". Rafael Kent filmed the video as a scarlet-lit drama of cardinals and a priest who wants out. This is the song the album will be remembered by.
The record tears the clock off the factory wall in its first minute.
"Obsessed" brings the guest. Dave Lombardo, the former Slayer drummer and a friend of Robinson's, joined Casagrande behind a two-man drum set, and Kisser told JacksonGuitars.com, in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth on 25 July 2013, that the result was "Two drummers, no cymbals." Two generations of thrash battery lock together on bare skins, the elder and the heir trading blows with no quarter given. "Manipulation of Tragedy" swings the other way, back toward the tribal percussion of the band's mid-nineties records, the toms rolling through it like a stamping press on the bottom floor of Lang's city.
The trouble sits in the middle of the running order. "Impending Doom" grinds along at mid-tempo without arriving anywhere, a conveyor belt carrying the same crate past the same window, and for a stretch of the record's centre the riffs settle into a holding pattern that the drums alone keep honest. Then "Grief" slows everything to clean guitars and Green singing rather than barking, mournful and exposed. I will take it over a fourth mid-tempo stomper every time, because it is the one place where the band lets the furnace cool long enough to show what the heat was for, and Green, out in the open with no wall of distortion to hide behind, holds his ground.
The closer is a homecoming of another kind. "Da Lama ao Caos", the title song of Chico Science & Nação Zumbi's 1994 debut, the record that welded maracatu drums to rock in Recife, comes back here as a loose, swinging send-off with the groove left in, a reminder that both bands were bolting Brazilian rhythm onto heavy guitars in the same mid-nineties years. It is a party after a shift in the machine hall. It earns its place.
What is left at the end is a tempered, hungry thrash record with a slack belt running through its middle and a drummer who refuses to let the line stop. The best of it, "The Vatican" above all, stands with the strongest music this line-up ever cut, and the worst of it is merely competent, never embarrassing. The price of passing it over is believing that the story of this band closed in 1996, which is exactly the myth these ten tracks were built to break on the factory floor.