Sepultura
3Olympia, Dublin
★★★★☆
Sepultura, Brazil’s biggest heavy metal export, have survived down the years through changing line-ups and musical fashions. They reached a commercial peak in the mid-1990s with their album Roots at a time when many of their metal contemporaries were floundering in the grunge era.
While founding members, the Cavalera brothers, are long departed – Max in 1996, Iggor 10 years later – Sepultura are somehow celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. It’s also their farewell tour, cheerily entitled Celebrating Life Through Death!
The band has had a stable line-up, with long-time guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Jr and the singer Derrick Green who has been a fixture since 1997. It is much the same line-up as when the band last played Dublin two years ago, with the exception of new drummer Greyson Nekrutman.
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You know you are an ageing metal fan when the drummers keep getting younger – he’s just 22. He joined after the sudden departure of Eloy Casagrande in February. He was warmly introduced to the crowd, a nice reminder that drummers aren’t interchangeable.
It was a sold-out show. Sepultura have a loyal fan base, many of them Brazilians in Ireland who cheered lustily when singer Derrick Green brought a Brazilian flag on stage. Sepultura are arguably the biggest exemplars of heavy metal as world music and they meld traditional Brazilian rhythms and a concern for the indigenous people into their sets.
Audience members joined on stage to bang a few kettle drums during Kaiowas, a song about a Brazilian tribe who threatened to commit mass-suicide rather than abandon their territory. Guardians of Earth, from Sepultura’s latest album, Quadra (2020), was dedicated to “indigenous peoples everywhere”. It begins with an acoustic intro played by guitarist Andreas Keller and builds through a series of progressively faster guitar arpeggios to a crescendo.
Sepultura though aren’t the Green Party: old standards from their time as a trash metal band in the 1980s, Escape to the Void, Troops of Doom, Inner Self and a cover of Motórhead’s Orgasmatron got the mosh pits going.
“Do you want to hear the older stuff?” singer Green asked the crowd. Of course they do, don’t all fans.
Green looks and sounds like a heavyweight boxer pummelling his quarry with guttural singing rather than his fists, while Kisser is one of the hardest working guitarists in metal, doing with one guitar what most bands can only achieve with two.
They could have carried on as a generic thrash band, but morphed into something much more and have continued to push the boundaries of what is possible within the limitations of extreme metal.
Sepultura continue to convey enthusiasm and passion for their music. If this is the end, they are not going quietly into the good night.
