Album Review: Vulcano - Bloody Vengeance, Anthropophagy, Ratrace
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
When I saw Vulcano remasters drop in the promo pool the reaction was visceral. My eyes bulged and time seemed seized around me, clasped by the gold talons of god himself. There they lay, 3 glittering prizes, as salacious and beckoning as words on a spreadsheet could ever be. “Review us, Eric” they whispered lustily. “Do justice to our might”. Reviewing these was not optional, in the typical sense of the word. It was... compulsion?... nay, DUTY that lead me here. And I hope, most fervently, in the deepest reaches of my heart, that by the end of this review I can convince you why I was so enraptured to have the opportunity to gush at length about the monolith that is Brazil’s homegrown sons, Vulcano.
Bloody Vengeance
It’s impossible to overstate how badass Bloody Vengeance is, but feel free to hang around while I fail in the attempt. Existing at that glorious far reach of thrash in which it begins to bleed into the serrated domain of black metal, Bloody Vengeance is an unyielding thrash assault, outrageously violent in both intent and execution. At 23 minutes long it’s more in line with sort of duration you might expect from an EP or 427 grindcore full-lengths, but quality shall always trump quantity and bloody vengeance packs more apoplectic aggression into it’s runtime than thrash albums twice it’s length.
It kicks off already at a sprint, reverb-drenched, hurling shurikens at your eardrums right from the off with the incensed scorched earth campaign that is “Dominios of Death”. The riffs are simple but catchy, played with such exuberance that it defies any attempt to avoid getting caught up with it’s urge to just blast your brains through your calvaria in gelatinous chunks. Then, while you kneel drooling and defeated, trying to scrape the remnants of your cortex back into your skull, Bloody Vengeance swings the hammer that is “Spirits of Evil” straight into your face. The snare drum gets the sort of beating that normally lands people life sentences, and the unruly screech of what passes for the guitar solos flies forth from the speakers like a howitzer round. It’s so goddamn cool, so virile, so alive. The gas pedal is virtually never released, but the moments in which it is hit like mortar fire. “Holocaust” takes a brief respite from taking a belt sander to you to deliver gut-mulching chug riffage at the 2:36 point, before chucking you back into it’s seething maelstrom for the back end of the track; it’s probably my favourite song on the album, but you could lackadaisically pitch a dart at Bloody Vengeance and virtually anything you hit would leave me with a grin that would span time zones.
Devilish eructations serenade us throughout, wild howls into a microphone that must have been left begging for it’s life by the time vocalist Angel was done with it. And the production...Jesus of Nazereth, it’s perfection itself. Raw and vital, as Beelzebub intended. Savage as it is, Bloody Venegeance does make occasional concessions to melody, most prominently in “Death Metal”, with a restrained – by Vulcano’s standards at least – introductory section before it realises that you’re trying to crawl away, and resumes smashing your head off the concrete. I just...words fail me when it comes to describing the frankly unhealthy love I have for this album. It’s emblematic of everything I love about Latin American thrash metal and it’s palpable desire to be faster and heavier than their contemporaries. I find this riveting charm to it, a fetid heart and soul that taps into the quintessence of metal itself. There’s an audible passion to the music that strikes me as just the most awesome thing ever, and I can’t help but be utterly head over heels for Bloody vengeance as a result.
A lone blemish is present in “Voices From Hell”, which is basically just comprised of hellacious chanting. It’s a minute and a half long, and while the worst that could be said is that it’s inessential, in an album as short as this one is, any filler makes for an unwelcome divergence. With that said, just because “Voices From Hell” is the only thing about this album that I’m not 100% sold on doesn’t mean that I’m blind to the problems someone else might have with it. If someone was to describe the production as “primitive” and bemoan the fact that the songs aren’t always played particularly tightly I couldn’t really mount a counteroffensive, because at the end of the day I can absolutely see why someone else wouldn’t like this. If you like your thrash with the masterly technical precision of, say, Megadeath, or the more expansive compositions of Metallica, then this may well not be your particular cup of tea. But if your tastes in thrash align more with mine, if you find yourself reaching for the atavistic warfare of “Endless Pain” by Kreator or “Morbid Visions” by Sepultura more often than Rust in Peace or Master of Puppets, then by Christ Bloody Vengeance may well be for you too. I am beyond enamoured with this album. I think it’s brilliant, and if my words have not been feeble, then hopefully I’ve able to give you a hint as to why.
Anthropophagy:
Imagine the best thrash album ever written, but everyone who turned up to record it was hopelessly drunk. There’s sloppy, there’s “bukkake party at the end of no-nut November” sloppy, and then there’s this. Barely anything is ever in time with any of the other instruments so the whole thing turns into a mathcore album by mistake. Guitars are barely ever in sync, vocals manifest essentially where they will, the drums are furious, but I’ve no idea if they’re paying the same song that anyone else is. Maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic but just listen to it for fuck sake. You can hear one guitar part lagging behind the other and missing notes constantly. It’s a far more technically demanding album than it’s predecessor ever was, on every level from the construction of the songs to the individual components that make those songs up. Take “Death Angel’s Armies” for example – man may never know what time signature it was supposed to be in, and perhaps that’s for the best. Lord knows, I’m no sophisticate when it comes to these things – you’ve just read me ruthlessly fellate Bloody Vengeance, which is hardly played with airtight proficiency either, but the additional complexity on offer in Anthropophagy does unfortunately make the loose playing far more readily noticeable in a way that I’m a bit less able to easily disregard.
To be clear, I still love this album. In it’s more ferocious moments it can and does rival the bellicosity of “Bloody Vengeance”, particularly in the scalding “Megathrash” and “Upright”, both of which hit incomprehensible levels of fury, tearing through the speakers at demented, skin peeling velocity. These two songs close out the album in undeniably excellent style, summoning forth the irrepressible rage of black metal and marrying it with a glorious thrash edge that has my horns thrown high enough to scrape the underbelly of the cosmos. Anthropophagy is still possessed by the same unstoppable rage that characterises the preceding release, and the riffs – irrespective of how well they are or are not played – are absolutely sublime. At all times, Anthrophagy feels like an album in which the band is straining at the utmost of their capabilities to deliver an annihilation protocol of an album. Songs like the title track chew maddened at the leash, seething blast-laden percussion fighting for a chance to wolf down the delectable cartilage of your throat. It feels less like the civilised process of simply listening to an album and more akin to being locked in a phone booth with a rabid, sexually frustrated chimpanzee.
The band do attempt to step beyond pure intensity though, with mixed results. “Fallen Angel” pulls in elements of classic doom, which winds up sounding not dissimilar to the type of soundscape that Greek heavyweights Rotting Christ would come to deploy heavily in the earlier parts of their career on a classics like “Thy Mighty Contract” or “Non Serviam”. The experiment isn’t wholly successful however – at six and a half minutes in length the song really does drag past, especially early on where it’s essentially just a single chug played over...and over...and over. Elsewhere, disposable bullshit like “Am I Crazy?” exists for some unintelligible reason. It’s only a minute long, hardly unforgivable in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time it’s literally just a drum roll. What is it here for? What does it add? Why bother with it’s inclusion? We may never know, but what I can tell you is that here and now in the year of our lord 2024, there is absolutely no worthwhile purpose to which I can ascribe this song’s existence. Obviously I wasn’t privy to the editing process for this album (assuming there to have been one), but had I been there, the intro to “Fallen Angel” and “Am I Crazy” in it’s entirety would have been the first things snipped.
I don’t hold Anthropophagy in the same slavish esteem in which I hold Bloody Vengeance. The flaws in it’s performance are harder to ignore and I can pick more nits with regards to the songwriting itself too. Despite this, I still had a complete blast with the album. It’s undeniably an acquired taste, but seeing as it’s a taste I happen to have acquired, it comes with my full and obsessive endorsement as a triumphant follow up to a cast-iron classic by my standards, as skewed and deformed as those standards might be. So as an imperative matter to which you categorically must attend, listen to this shit – if you can connect with the feral monstrosity that is Brazilian thrash metal, then I reckon you’ll love this thing just as much as I do.
Ratrace:
Of these three remasters, Ratrace is beyond contention the most polished. The band are all playing roughly in time with each other, and the production has taken unheard-of steps towards legibility. It’d be a stretch to call it “progressive”, but it does put me in mind of albums like “Release From Agony” by Destruction or “Years of Decay” by Overkill, one of those albums where a band is expanding their horizons with more adventurous songwriting. It’s a more measured collection of tactical strikes than their previous efforts, and while there are advantages to that...would it be too curmudgeonly to suggest that I miss the heretical bloodthirst of it’s older brothers? Ratrace pares back the zealous speed freak absurdity of “Bloody Vengeance” and “Anthropophagy”; in conjunction with performances that are orders of magnitude tighter this is clearly the most accessible of these three remasters, and as such if you’re coming to Vulcano with your thrash grounding primarily in bands like the big four or Testament, this is probably the easiest stop at which to board the train.
Early tracks especially hit this delightful mix of beefy thrash excellence; “White Violence” for example is a killer opening track, resplendent with groovy palm muted beatdowns and sudden spurts of neck threatening viciousness. Elsewhere, off-kilter tracks toy with their time signatures to keep you on your toes. Following “White Violence”, “Last Day” flips playfully between tempos and timings to keep you guessing before hooking you right back in. The guitar solos have had something of a glow up too; they’re still abrasive and noisy, but there’s a semblance of organisation and method to the madness that places them at least potentially beyond the improvised whammy bar abuse of days gone by. We’re in a space that’s still more murderous than what could I suppose be considered mainstream thrash, but it is at least within sniffing distance of acts with broader commercial viability than we have been with prior releases from this band. They’re not always on the money with this approach though. “Welcome to the Army” struggles with weak, repetitive riffs. It’s short length is a blessing insofar as at least it’s over quickly, but equally it simply feels like underdeveloped filler more than anything else.
I wonder if my opinions about this album are coloured somewhat by the fact that I’m reviewing these albums in sequence. Listened to in isolation, I feel as though I’d probably be broadly complimentary towards how fast Ratrace actually is, but in comparison to the completely mental charge of the first two Vulcano albums, it perhaps can’t help but come across as subdued by comparison. And that isn’t altogether fair – the band are still more than happy to drink drive at incautious miles per hour on a routine basis. Throughout, say, “The Lungs of the Earth” Vulcano are regularly maxing out the rev counter, dousing the competition in choking exhaust fumes as they vanish from sight in the rear view mirror. They’re just doing so with a more practised, veteran edge this time – less mellowed so much as seasoned, aware of where best to press the assault. Be under no impression to the contrary; Ratrace is a mightily impressive display of early 90’s thrash metal, and my quibbles with it do seem to stem more from a cantankerous desire to see Vulcano retread a path that they aren’t attempting to walk, more than an assessment of what the band have actually done on it’s own merit. In particular, I love the bass tone they’ve gone for; mellifluous and rotund, it anchors each fresh salvo, popping joyously through the mix throughout. I could take a heavier guitar sound, though that’s a minor issue – the dirty, garage sound is ultimately part of the appeal and what’s present is at the end of the day a fine fit for the tunes on offer.
To that end, let me finish by freely admitting that Ratrace kicks all kinds of ass. As a swansong of sorts before the band split up for a time, releasing nothing until 14 long years down the line, it’s an unshakable mission statement of pure thrash supremacy from a band that has never had the accolades they deserved from anyone but the underground metal diehards. The best time to get into this band was years ago; the second best time, just as these remasters grace us, is right now. Their growth as musicians and songwriters is evident across all three releases, and while
I’ll probably always prefer the craziness of Bloody Vengeance, it’s Ratrace that sees the band at their creative height as composers.
As a tripartite review this was always going to be a lengthy affair, but I hope I’ve managed to be relatively concise in discussing each album while also giving you a hint of the regard I have for this band. They’ve been criminally overlooked over the years, and if you’ve yet to sample their wares, I urge you to rectify that glaring omission in your listening post-haste. Maybe you won’t care for it. Fine. Taste is subjective after all. But I personally consider Vulcano to be legendary, and with any luck, I’ve been able to convince you why.
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