"Roots" is the sixth studio album by Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura. It was released in 1996 and is the band's last studio album to feature founding member and vocalist/rhythm guitarist Max Cavalera.
"While "Chaos AD" saw Sepultura start to develop an earthier sound, "Roots" took the process much further. There’s no sheen to it. "Roots" is loud, in a way that extreme metal at the time rarely was. The drums are high in the mix and the distortion is raw. Max Cavalera sounds like he is straining every fibre of his being to scream out the lyrics. The riffs are mostly simple – often just sequences of a couple of chords – and there are no tricksy time changes. Songs don’t finish neatly; they collapse or are abandoned.
At its best, "Roots" is thrilling, immediate and punchy. You get the sense that, for Sepultura in 1996, ‘roots’ was a signifier of authenticity as much as of sense of place. While authenticity is an eminently deconstructable concept, it can lead artists to let go of the insecurity that equates great art with elaborate complexity. On tracks like ‘Dictatorshit’ and ‘Straighthate’ you can witness the joy of letting go of extreme metal’s frequent confusion of ‘brutality’ with cleanly-executed rifferama.
Historically, there was no precedent in metal for Sepultura’s collaboration with Carlinhos Brown and even now ‘Ratamahatta’ is startling in its novelty. To collaborate with an Afro-Brazilian musician, to infuse metal with percussion, to eschew formal complexity in favour of improvised spontaneity – all this was new. And its combination of sludgy down-tuned guitars, batteries of drums and an almost-ecstatic vocal line remains infectiously enjoyable...
25 years after "Roots" [was originally released], metal is a much more diverse genre than it was. Think of an instrument or a style of music and the chances are that some metal artist somewhere will have experimented with it.
Sepultura were not the only and not the first contributors to this permissive environment. Skyclad’s British folk metal and the metal-rap collaborations on the "Judgement Night" soundtrack preceded "Roots" by some years. And during the same period in which Sepultura embraced Brazil, the burgeoning black metal scene was embracing its own vision of ethnic/national identity.
Sepultura’s ‘Brazil’ was not the same as black metal's ‘Norway’. It’s not just that ‘Brazil’ was constructed as multicultural and ‘Norway’ as racially homogeneous; the key difference is that ‘Norway’ did not involve real Norwegians. The Vikings are long gone, as is their music. That gives enormous scope for musical reinventions that do not require wrestling with dilemmas of how to integrate musicians and musics from very different backgrounds. Where Sepultura and their Nordic peers did share is a reaction against what death metal had become. Just as Darkthrone deliberately turned their backs on the death metal sound of "Soulside Journey" and created a deliberately rough-hewn black metal, so Sepultura curbed their hard-won death metal technicality. For ‘roots’ read ‘true’." - The Quietus
Compact Disc Pressing
Tracklist:
1. Roots Bloody Roots
2. Attitude
3. Cut-Throat
4. Ratamahatta
5. Breed Apart
6. Straighthate
7. Spit
8. Lookaway
9. Dusted
10. Born Stubborn
11. Jasco
12. Itsári
13. Ambush
14. Endangered Species
15. Dictatorshit
16. Canyon Jam
