Review by\u00a0Cesar Glanville \/ Photo by John Meadows<\/p>\n
Return to Roots is the title of the tour. The two brothers responsible for putting Brazil on the metal map reuniting for the first time in a long time to bring us Sepultura classic songs the way they should be: sung with all of their native Brazilian grooves by, well a Brazilian \u2013 not some guy from Cleveland (no offense Mr. Green). Max and Iggor may have not had the savviest lawyers and lost the rights to use the name Sepultura, but let\u2019s be honest: They ARE Sepultura.<\/p>\n
Before the brothers took the stage Combichrist warmed up the crowd with, well, a straight up metal set. It\u2019s been years since I\u2019ve seen Combichrist \u2013 they USED to be an industrial band \u2013 that ship has sailed. Sure you can hear the tinge of keyboards here and there and an occasional splash 4 on the floor madness but this was a metal band. Not since Ministry moved from synthpop to thrash have we seen such a transformation. Well there\u2019s good news, they were an excellent industrial band but they\u2019re also a pretty decent metal band. As an opener on metal tour, perhaps, they don\u2019t get to explore some of the older material in that sense but songs like \u201cSlakt\u201d, \u201cNever Surrender\u201d and \u201cWe are the Plague\u201d are fist-pumping anthems in their own right.<\/p>\n
\u2026on to the headliner: Max with his mono-dread and Iggor sporting a RevCo shirt (we should note the music between Combichrist and Max & Iggor was mainly old Chicago industrial, so the shirt fit right in<\/em>) well the brothers wasted no time reviving a song to song recreation of the album \u201cRoots\u201d opening with the tribal-metal anthem \u201cRoots Bloody Roots\u201d. 20 years later these songs are as fresh as ever and hearing Max slash through the vocals makes them seem even more relevant. This was not a nostalgia trip, this was a master presenting his opus. The native instruments, fantastic tom work by Iggor and thrash and groove metal riffs could have been written yesterday.<\/p>\n The novelty of these \u2018play a whole album\u2019 tours is you may get to hear songs you dig and they never play live and sure that\u2019s fun but it also eats up some time for songs you really want to hear! One or two form \u2018Arise\u2019 or \u2018Chaos A.D.\u2019 would\u2019ve been welcome \u2013 perhaps there\u2019s anniversary tours in store for those ??? What we did get was a blistering rendition of the full album followed by two covers the slow dirge of Celtic Frost\u2019s \u201cProcreation of the Wicked\u201d and an homage to one of the guys who started it all: Motorhead\u2019s \u201cAce of Spades\u201d.<\/p>\n For more on the Cavalera Brothers tour, click here<\/a><\/p>\n