MAX CAVALERA On Re-Recordings Of Early SEPULTURA Albums: ‘We Had A Chance To Redo Something That We Weren’t Totally Happy With’

In a new interview with Iain McCallum, former SEPULTURA guitarist/vocalist Max Cavalera spoke about why he and his brother, former SEPULTURA drummer Igor “Iggor” Cavalera decided to revisit their earliest SEPULTURA releases, “Morbid Visions” and “Bestial Devastation”, and re-record them and put them out, along with a re-recorded version of guitarist Andreas Kisser’s first album with SEPULTURA, “Schizophrenia”. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Those are the records that we felt they needed to showcase the sound properly. I think they are great songs and they’re great records, but they’re very badly recorded because of the situation we were in, in the Brazilian studios without money and without producers. And the best we could come up [with] was that at that time. But I think our own original vision for those albums and songs are different than what it came out. So we had the chance, years later, to go back in the studio and redo them with a great guitar sound, with a great drum sound, with a real professional producer, but keeping all the aggression. And it’s still dirty and aggressive and pissed off and angry. And the heart of the thing is intact. So I think that was the coolest thing about these re-recordings, was actually how to go back in time, grab something that was done 40 years ago, make them sound relevant right now, but it still has the same spirit of the original. And I think that was the main mission of this recording, was to do that. And I think we did it. I think a lot of fans love the re-recordings. I myself, as a musician, I love it because I think a lot of songs came to life on these re-recordings that, in the original record, they were buried with shitty sound. And when you listen to them on the re-recordings, stuff like ‘Mayhem’ and pretty much the whole ‘Schizophrenia’, ‘From The Past Comes The Storms’ and ‘To The Wall’ and ‘Septic Schizo’, they are amazing songs, man. It’s hard to believe that I wrote them when I was 15, 16 years old. That’s incredible on its own, ’cause they’re crazy songs. But yeah, we had the chance, me and Igor, to do that. And then we got to involve a new generation of players, like my son Igor [on bass] and Travis [Stone on leader guitar]. They come with the new blood of the newer metal that has been done right now in the underground. So that’s cool — the clash of generations and the chance to redo something that you did a long time ago that you weren’t totally happy with. Not many musicians get a chance to do that. So I had the blessing to be able to do that. And we took it very seriously, though.”Max added: “The hard part was… I think there’s a human thing about changing. You wanna change, right? So you have the originals. So there’s the temptation to change the songs. And I had to resist that temptation. I told Igor, ‘We don’t need to change the songs. They’re fucking great. There’s nothing wrong. They just need to be played better and to sound better.’ So I think we resisted the temptation to mess about changing them, modernize them. They don’t need to be modernized. They’re good as they were. We just played them better, executed them better, recorded them better with the same piss-and-vinegar attitude. So that was a lot of fun.”In a separate interview with Australia’s Heavy, Max was asked if he thinks those early SEPULTURA albums would have been as well received had they been as well recorded back in the 1980s. Max said: “We never had a manual how to do this stuff. We did it on the fly. They call it, you’re gonna wing it, you’re just gonna do it by trial and error. And that’s the beauty of these records — they were full of stuff that really comes out of nowhere. Like, what I was thinking when I made this riff; this riff is crazy. What the hell was I thinking? But it’s beautiful, man. It’s cool. It shows that even at the age of 14, 15, I had that metal in my veins. I had that wild metal flowing through my blood, and I just went for it. And now I have a chance to revisit, as an older person, and still get the same enjoyment from these albums that I got it when I was a kid. It’s an incredible feeling. You get to do this. I feel very fortunate, me and my brother, we are able to celebrate our past through these albums and get to play them live for people. It’s an incredible feeling.”SEPULTURA fell apart in 1996 with the exit of Max after the rest of the Brazilian four-piece split with the vocalist/guitarist’s wife Gloria as their manager. Max’s brother, drummer Igor stuck around with the group for another ten years before leaving SEPULTURA and re-teaming with Max in CAVALERA CONSPIRACY.For the new versions of “Morbid Visions”, “Bestial Devastation” and “Schizophrenia”, the Cavalera brothers enlisted Travis Stone (PIG DESTROYER) on lead guitars. The full lineup would consist of more Cavalera alumni, as Igor Amadeus Cavalera (GO AHEAD AND DIE, HEALING MAGIC) once more brought his talents on bass to the fold.CAVALERA’s version of “Schizophrenia” was recorded from April 15, 2023 to June 5, 2023 at Focusrite Room in Mesa Arizona. Mixing and mastering was handled by Arthur Rizk (SOULFLY, GO AHEAD AND DIE, TURNSTILE). The original “Schizophrenia” cover artwork was restored in hand-painted watercolors by Eliran Kantor.Last November, Kisser was asked by IMPACT Metal Channel for his opinion about Max and Igor’s decision to re-record “Morbid Visions” and “Bestial Devastation”, and re-record them and put them out, along with a re-recorded version of Andreas’s first album with SEPULTURA, “Schizophrenia”. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I don’t think anything. I mean, it’s a weird choice that they had. I think artistic value is zero. Maybe they’re going for some money or something, but there’s no reason to do something like that. I much rather prefer THE TROOPS OF DOOM, the new band from Jairo [former SEPULTURA guitarist Jairo ‘Tormentor’ Guedz], which are doing a really amazing tribute to that era, very honest, doing new stuff, writing new music… But if they’re having a good time, so let it be. I don’t care, man. I just think it’s totally unnecessary. It’s really very disrespectful from themselves, for their own selves in the past.”Andreas added: “It’s weird to see a guy [Max] who always says, ‘Oh, I did this,’ ‘I did all that,’ ‘I’m so creative,’ and ‘I did everything by myself,’ and doing this shit, like re-recording riffs that we did 30, 40 years ago. It doesn’t click, the rhetoric with the example. But whatever. I just don’t think that — the artistic value is zero.”Earlier last year, Max told V13 about the decision to re-record “Morbid Visions”, “Bestial Devastation” and “Schizophrenia”: “I think [Igor and I] were [doing special tours celebrating] the other [SEPULTURA] records, like we did ‘Roots’, and then we did ‘Beneath The Remains’ and the reaction was so explosive and the fans were reacting so good, with the way we were playing that stuff live that, I mentioned to Igor that it would be cool to have this sound on this old records that sound like shit, especially if we can get them to sound the way we sound now because we sound great right now with the way we are playing.”A lot of people are… there’s a big taboo about re-recording,” Max continued. “There are a lot of people who are [freaked out] about touching old stuff. I had to kind of block all that and think, ‘Fuck it. Let’s do it, man, but let’s do it the way we wanna do it, the way we wanna hear it as fans.’ I think that’s the difference in the approach that we took. So ‘Morbid Visions’, ‘Bestial Devastation’, it’s still very dirty and aggressive, maybe even more aggressive than the original. We play a little bit faster and it’s more angrier. I don’t know how, but it’s angrier than the original. I think that’s key for these records. We don’t want it a digital, brand new modern sound. We just want it to sound live, like a good live-sounding [recording] and we did that. I think that’s why it sounded so cool. Of course, when we did those, we knew what we were going to do with ‘Schizophrenia’, because it’s another record that we feel it’s never really lived up to the potential. The songs are great, but they were never really recorded the right way. So now we’re very happy. We did the three, we got the trilogy and we got to tour for it.”Although SEPULTURA has maintained a diehard fanbase in all parts of the world throughout the band’s nearly four-decade history, Max-era albums “Roots” and “Chaos A.D.” were by far SEPULTURA’s most commercially successful, having both been certified gold in the U.S. for sales in excess of five hundred thousand copies.In December 2023, SEPULTURA announced that it would celebrate its 40th anniversary this year by embarking on a “farewell tour” which will cover the entire globe.SEPULTURA’s current lineup comprises Kisser, vocalist Derrick Green, bassist Paulo Xisto Pinto Jr. and drummer Greyson Nekrutman, who officially replaced SEPULTURA’s longtime drummer Eloy Casagrande in February 2024.[embedded content]