Sepultura – Kairos

Brazilian metal legends are back in a big way with their 12th studio album. Kairos has a huge sound, the buzz-saw guitars start off immediately with the opener, “Spectrum,” and does not slow down until the final tracks. One of the final songs being a cover of Prodigy’s “Firestarter” – you remember, that UK electro band that was hot shit for a while back in the day. Although, through Sepultura’s career they have had many line up changes and more notably a switch in lead singer/screamer, which may have turned some people off and caused a little bit of a rift in the band. When lead vocalist Derrick Green joined the band it took a couple of albums for the band to find their stride, but with Kairos they have found their mark. “Relentless” and “Dialog” are my personal favorites, the latter with segments of creepy spoken vocals that morph into heavy blasts and the former with drill sergeant-like urgency. The album is uniquely broken up into titled sections of two to three songs each that all correspond to a random year. This allows the listener to catch their breathe on the short interval tracks such as “2011,” “1433,” “5772” and “4648,” before the band then continues with its ruthless heavy metal onslaught. These metal legends have still got it because Kairos is an absolute victory. (Nuclear Blast Records, nuclearblast.de) Scott Wolfe