Mystic Massacre

Bode Preto are a Brazilian band who do a brilliant job of invoking their country’s extreme metal history. They have ties to scene legends like Sarcofago and Holocausto, and the album cover is violently insulting towards their country’s Catholicism in a nice, retro kind of way. The music here is super-fast blackened thrash, with absolutely no fat on the bones whatsoever (plenty of tracks are sub-two minutes). It’s invigorating.

The riffing fizzes with energy, sometimes channelling the unclean Euro-thrash of Destruction and Sodom; other times the bands mentioned in the first paragraph. Sometimes, there is also a clearer second wave black metal influence too. The likes of Dirty Honey could fit very easily onto a classic Mayhem release, for instance.

Having said this, there is more going on here than just exhilarating retro. Various tracks are a bit more layered, piling on shrill lead guitar lines so as to create actual melody (albeit of an extremely simple kind)- see Deep Reality or the weirdly hypnotic jangling of Unknown Woman. Absurds of Violence also has a particularly brilliant guitar solo, which is just about twenty seconds of alternating very fast between two notes. Finally, tracks like Feet of Clay have a ‘cavernous’ vibe akin to recent death metal such as Ignivomous. But this is probably more to do with a shared lineage rather than direct inspiration.

Unquestionably worth hearing.