Soulfly
Conquer
Roadrunner Records

by Hugh Platt

After 5 albums, 4 guitarists, 4 bassists, 2 drummers, and more collaborations than you can shake a matted dreadlock at, Max Cavalera is back with Soulfly’s sixth album, Conquer. And it’s fucking terrifying.

If Soulfly started to turn away from world-music-metal with 2006’s Dark Ages, then Conquer is when they spun right around and barrelled into the world of metal like a thrash battering ram.

Joined on vocal duties by David Vincent of Morbid Angel, Max Cavalera opens Conquer with a stomping war chant in ‘Blood Fire War Hate’. It feels like the chant of an army marching out the gates of hell itself. It’s a declaration of intent for the rest of the record – Soulfly are going to war.

You can almost hear the spit flying throught the air as Cavalera barks rage over the stuttering machine gun guitars of ‘Unleash’. By the time the firestorm thrash of ‘Fall Of The Sycophants’ tears out your speakers like a Russian airstrike, the reason why a decade of mixed results hasn’t dented the appetite of his audience for records with the Cavalera name attached is brutally clear. At times Conquer comes bullet-burn close to the genius of Chaos AD.

Watch the video to ‘Unleash’ by Soulfly

Okay, towards the end of the album, Max can’t help himself from inserting a few ludicrously unnecessary experiments – the long-winded dub wind-down of ‘Doom’, the David Lynch-ish goth-jazz at the end of ‘Touching The Void’, and pretty much all of the sub-Santana nonsense of ‘Soulfly VI’ will have you reaching for the skip button.

But that’s just the Soulfly way – until there’s a full-scale Sepultura re-union, Conquer is as good as we’re likely to get. If it requires us to sign up for a handful of sorties into misguided experimentation before we get the full Soulfly artillery assault, then consider us drafted.

5/6

Conquer by Soulfly is out now on Roadrunner Records