Anthropophagy

Leave it to a heavy metal band -- from Brazil, of all places -- to dig up such a fancy word for cannibalism out of the dictionary! Anthropophagy was Vulcano's third full album, but their first to feature a significantly re-tooled lineup that saw founding bassist and general mastermind Zhema Rodero taking over guitar duties, and adding a new rhythm section (bass player Fernando Levine and drummer Arthur Justo) to support himself and longtime vocalist Angel. The end result was a noticeably more technical and diverse LP, which, for the most part, managed to display Vulcano's improving songwriting and playing maturity while retaining their familiarly roughhewn, dirty black metal qualities, but did so without nearly as much spontaneity. The band's increasing notoriety among Brazilian authority figures -- the Catholic church chief among them -- also led to a more direct lyric-writing approach targeting those very same institutions ("Death Angel's Armies," "Brainwash"), but there remained enough gratuitous tales of graphic terror ("Red Death," "Upright," the title track) and the thrashing brotherhood ("Stirring," "Megathrash,") to stop things from getting too serious. And despite suffering from the usual, under-produced sonic muck, several tracks stood out of the pack in unexpected ways: "Fallen Angel" for slowing things down to a crawl and spewing words as disturbing as they were damn near incomprehensible; "F.T.W. (F**k the War)" for showing an uncommonly anti-apocalypse point of view, and "Anyone Can Kill" for sheer advanced thrashing musicianship -- thus confirming Anthropophagy as one of Vulcano's strongest efforts. [Because bassist Zhema lost the original master tapes to a conniving foreign label, Cogumelo Records' CD reissue of Anthropophagy was transferred directly from vinyl! So don't expect any improvement upon the original article's already substandard audio fidelity.] ~ Eduardo Rivadavia