With tracks like Blood Fire War Hate, Paranoia, Warmageddon and Doom, Soulfly’s sixth album Conquer is bound to conjure up some pretty heavy battle imagery. With frontman Max Cavalera claiming the album is “more about conquering fear than conquering enemies or the world”, you could assume it’s an indictment of the ‘War On Terror’.
Then again, maybe not. After all, listening to music can be like staring at a psychological inkblot diagram. Cavalera is comfortable with the many interpretive meanings in his lyrics. He acknowledges that while musicians may have intellectual property rights over their tunes, ‘meaning’ is (in a sense) public property. For him it seems, Conquer is akin to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That fear, the Brazilian born musician says, “could be anything – personal fear, fear of music, fear of being yourself. Anything really.”
The title, Conquer, was Cavalera’s first response to the album’s preliminary cover art sketchings, featuring a savage six-armed warrior holding six weapons – each representing one of Soulfly’s records. It isn’t the first instance of image-based creativity in the making of the album (which has been likened to a musical translation of movies such as 300, Braveheart and Gladiator.)
“I think watching movies and reading books are good exercises for the mind,” he says excitedly. “And watching some interesting documentaries, you know? There’s one called Touching the Void which ended up being the name of a song on Conquer. It’s about mountain climbers climbing Everest. It’s a sick movie. The guys end up losing all their fingers and their toes to climb Everest. I mean I never knew they went to those lengths to climb mountains, you know? It’s such an ordeal.”
The opener Blood Fire War Hate begins with what sounds like an army marching – a battle chant crescendos into the foreground backed by timpani, strings and rumbling guitar chug. About 50 seconds in, the song explodes into a savage cacophony of ballad-bashing guitar onslaughts and tribal polyrhythms. It’s a good sampler for an album that makes no attempts to sound pretty.
Since his Chaos AD days with metal giants Sepultura, Max has fused elements of world music with metal. After leaving the band in 1996 and beginning Soulfly the following year, every album has found him globetrotting to locations such as Serbia, Russia, Kosovo and Brazil in search of new sounds, images and cultural ideas. With Conquer, Max took to Egypt for ten days.
“One song, Fall of the Sycophants was inspired by the city of the dead,” he explains. “Some of the neighbourhoods in Cairo they had family who live with the dead people in the cemetery together. I’ve never seen that before anywhere else so it made a really huge impact on me. I also got really lucky because I was in a boat on the Nile and there was a Nubian band playing Nubian music and I got to record them. It just sounded so cool and so different. I got to meet the band after their performance and asked if they could play one more time so I could record them and put their music on my album. They were really happy,” he laughs. “I ended up sending them a copy of the album and they really liked it; they were really thrilled.”
It’s been 11 years since Max began Soulfly. Despite widespread cynicism about whether or not the band would be successful he with an ever-changing line-up of musicians (this time round Mark Rizzo on guitars, Joe Nunez on drums and Bobby Burns on bass) has released six studio albums.
“To me what was really cool was that I didn’t continue with the same set [after leaving Sepultura]. I had to start doing gigs at little clubs and basically starting from zero all over again. That’s something I didn’t appreciate until later but it definitely made an impact on me. There was a lot of coping to learn from that, which I think made me a lot stronger than I was before.”
Conquer is Soulfly’s most hard-hitting album to date and is out now through Road Runner Records.
