December 2019 Feature Release - The Horde Edition

The start of December sees us kicking off a new undertaking. We'll be nominating a monthly feature release for each clan & are asking you to rate, review & discuss it for no other reason than because we enjoy it. Ben & I will certainly be contributing & we look forward to hearing your thoughts too. 

This month's feature release for The Horde is the 1985 five-track debut E.P. from Brazilian thrash metallers Sepultura entitled "Bestial Devastation". Well to our ears this release was as much early death metal as it was thrash so we think it qualifies for inclusion here. "Bestial Devastation" was originally released as one half of a split album with countrymen Overdose but was re-released on its own with a bonus track in 1990 after the band had made a name for themselves. For the purposes of this exercise we're going to go with the re-release in the interest of consistency. We're interested to hear what you think of this little record so don't be shy with your feedback.

I'm pretty sure this is the same version of "Troops Of Doom" as the bonus track.

Since my review was short I'll just copy and paste it here for discussion sake:

A Molten Foundation

Bestial Devastation shows the remarkable beginnings of a young Sepultura as they recorded this fiery but disheveled EP in just two days. While obviously messy and laden with performance issues, the amount of ideas and concepts for an even darker and more aggressive take on Thrash Metal is ambitious and impressive. I think their ambition got the best of them as they struggle to keep up with the intense tempos and compositions that require the band to play perfectly on time together, but the messiness on an already lower quality EP adds that classic grime that early Death Metal thrives on. It's raw, furious, and somewhat exciting even by today's standards. Certain parts and melodies sometimes just end out of nowhere and could have been written better and expanded more, but for what Sepultura had to work with at the time the riffs and solos that come out of Bestial Devastation are more than sufficient. Not to mention the drummer goes absolutely nuts on the entire album, showing that Thrash style drumming can be expanded upon to hit even harder than it already did. A fun but definitely dirty EP that shouldn't be skipped over when looking at the classics of Death Metal.