Issue #57: Sepultura – Roots

Released:  February 20th, 1996

Recorded:  October – December 1995

Genre:  Groove Metal

Record Label:  Roadrunner

Duration:  72:08

Producers:  Ross Robinson, Sepultura

Personnel

Track Listing

Singles

Why Roots is One of My Favorites

Roots is one of those albums that music critics loved and that many fans lashed out against.  My knowledge of Sepultura’s catalog is spotty at best; I’ve listed to Beneath the Remains and Arise and other vaunted albums, but I don’t have a firm hold on them like I do Roots, which I listened to plenty in my youth.  Roots was also my first exposure to Sepultura, and for both of these reasons I never had this preconception of Sepultura as an awesome thrash metal or death metal band; for me, it was just Roots.

Roots is a lot of things wrapped into one.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  I do like the album, and it has some really great songs that I would hate to be without, though I must admit that it is probably one of the more flawed albums amid my favorites.  The main problem is that it tries to cram a little bit too much into one package.  There are the lingering trails of past death/thrash metal records, their growing “groove” elements, the overt addition of native Brazilian music, and influence taken from Korn’s 1994 debut album which apparently thoroughly impressed the guys in Sepultura.

It’s when their heavy metal “roots” (no pun intended) coalesce with nu-metal that the album really finds itself.  The native instrumentation so highly regarded by the music press comes off as distracting and out of place and rarely adds anything to the music (except for perhaps “Ratamahatta”).  Sometimes, I think these guys tried a little too hard to pay tribute to Korn and a few of these songs start sounding like blatant copies; worse still, they begin to bleed into each other and lose distinction as individual pieces.  I think the real problem here is length – cut out the 10 minute tribal “Canyon,” the other two instrumentals (“Jasco” and “Itsari”) and 2 or 3 of the weaker Korn clones, and this would be a much tighter album, remembered as a heavier-than-average nu-metal release.

But enough about the shortcomings; let’s get to what made Roots one of my favorites.  The first 8 tracks are, for the most part, exceptional.  “Roots, Bloody Roots” opens the album with a bang, and is probably my favorite track.  A simple, driving riff carries most of the song and comes pretty damn close to the exact sound Korn found on Korn.  But I’m not complaining.  It’s a heavy song that chugs along with the emphatic shouting of “Rooooots!  Bloody Rooooots!” fro Cavalera.  There’s also a couple of breakdowns that serve to reinforce the main riff when it kicks back in.

“Attitude” starts out a little rocky, but soon morphs into a thrash/nu-metal hybrid with the album’s most impressive drumming.  Cavalera screams his way through this one – I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about, but that’s ok.  “Cut” is quick and a tad chaotic; a sort of mashup of the influences that Roots draws from.  “Ratamahatta” gives us our first full dose of “tribal stuff.”  It’s kind of silly, but it’s kind of fun too.  I almost look at it as a novelty track, though I won’t deny the interesting percussion at work and how effective the seemingly gibberish vocals are delivered in such a quick and dirty style.

“Breed Apart” brings us to closer to actual groove metal, and Cavalera lets loose everything from shouts to screams to screeches to growls.  It gets a little chaotic during the latter half, but the guitars never stop pounding away.  “Straighthate” produces another solid groove and a muddier, darker sound, all overlain with a nu-metal inspired “lead” guitar part.  “Spit” brings some death metal undertones with it to become one of the fastest songs on the album.  “Lookaway” is a slower, creepier, weirder version of a Korn song, featuring both Jonathan Davis of Korn and Mike Patton from Faith No More on vocals.  It took me a while to warm up to “Lookaway,” but I like the change of pace it brings and the foreboding tone.

These 8 tracks aren’t perfect – for instance, I think too many of them (“Lookaway,” “Straighthate,” “Attitude”) take too long to really get moving and nearly all of the apart from “Spit” and “Cut” go through this long process of whimpering out and ending.  Aside from this, they’re pretty solid if not at least original and interesting to listen to.  The next pair, “Dusted” and “Born Stubborn,” and are as heavy and groovin’ as anything else, though they sound too similar to be next to each other.  They aren’t completely indistinguishable, but they aren’t completely unique either.  “Dusted,” apart from its protracted intro, is the stronger of the two and sort of neuters “Born Stubborn.”

I’m sure that “Jasco” and “Itsari” have some cultural relevance to the band, and I’m not knocking them for being proud of their home country and their “roots” (no pun intended again), but they simply don’t belong here.  It’s the equivalent of essentially any album of American origin including 5 or 6 minutes of obligatory bluegrass or old timey music.  Why is there?  Neither are integrated with the band’s sound, they’re just there.  “Ambush” is par for the course at this point, though quite oddly, about halfway through it transitions to more tribal stuff with no greater relation to the rest of the track.  And then, out of nowhere, the guitars all kick back in and Cavalera starts up the scream for a final few seconds.  “Endangered Species” and “Dictatorshit” are more of the same.  It’s heavy, it’s rhythmic, and there’s nothing really wrong with it, but at this point Roots is just backpedaling with the same sound over and over.  Maybe if the grooves had been little more memorable or if the tempos were changed up a bit it’d be more interesting; unfortunately it just tends to feel like the same thing over and over again.  And then there’s “Canyon,” another long, frankly boring instrumental tribal piece.

Ok, so I might sound crazy for calling Roots one of my favorites after all that, and it does sort of teeter on the edge to be honest.  I feel like the issue is less about the music and more about how the album is put together.  I like the music on here.  I could flip to any one of these “normal” tracks and have a great time listening to it.  Cavalera is high energy, the guitars pulsate and churn in head-bobbing rhythms, and there’s a nice density and thickness to the sound.  The problem is that I might not be able to tell you which song it is.  Sepultura stumbled upon a great sound (for the most part), they just didn’t quite succeed at channeling it into discrete pieces of work, or at least not enough to get them through a 70 minute album.

Cuts like “Roots, Bloody Roots,” “Spit,” “Lookaway,” and “Ratamahatta” all have recognizable riffs and rhythms and they do a decent job of mixing Sepultura’s heavier sound with emerging nu-metal.  Even the ones that fall between the cracks have a great general sound behind them, and I think that if Sepultura had chosen to cull their tribal pieces and trim the fat on existing songs, we’d have a good-not-great album to work with.

Written by The Cubist

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Written by The Cubist

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I collect as much video gaming paraphernalia as I can get my hands on, especially when it comes to hardware. With over 40 systems including oldies like the ColecoVision and Intellivision, obscurities like the CD-i and 3DO, and the latest and greatest including the Wii U, PS4, Xbox One, 3DS, and PS Vita, I get easily overwhelmed. Most of the time you can find me firmly nestled sometime between 1985 and 1995 when it comes to my games of choice, but I’m also having a great time seeing what the 8th generation has to offer.

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