Review Summary: A comedy metal treat with plenty of stupid jokes and headbangable jams.
Nowadays, MTV is not even a shadow of what it was back in the day. And after the closure of many of its international subsidiaries, today the channel broadcasts in many countries more or less the same stuff that it shows in the US. But back in its glorious times, just before the rise of YouTube, the channel had some brilliant stuff going on out there - and MTV Brasil was an example of that.
Closed in 2013, it showed a vibrant mix of music, football and humor shows. And in the humor department their best feature was arguably Hermes & Renato, a sketch show made by a group of childhood friends filled with hilariously cheap production, ridiculous characters, lowbrow gags and satire against everything and everybody, from Brazilian stereotypes and social themes to musical genres such as axé, samba and new wave.
In that context, longtime buddies Bruno Sutter, Fausto Fanti, Marco Antonio Alves, Adriano Pereira and Felipe Torres decided to satirize heavy metal - after all, the genre was filled with Brazilian metalheads singing in broken English, dudes with ridiculous outfits, bands with “dark” names, cheesy and almost homoerotic artwork at times (yeah, I’m pointing to you, Manowar), and so on. So, why not joke around with all that?
The thing, however, is that those guys are huge fans of heavy metal and actually know how to play. The act isn’t a mere gimmick. So don’t be fooled by the non-existent word that names the band, the hilarious Manowar-esque art cover and the album’s ridiculous name: their lyrics are pretty stupid and hard to understand for an English audience, but their instrument display offers genuine metal power and lots of fun.
In a blatant reference to the first track in Sepultura’s debut album, the album starts with the album’s producer Joao Gordo (the iconic vocalist of punk rock band Ratos de Porao) speaking in a creepy, demonic voice with goat noises in the background… telling a cake recipe from a sweetener box. And right afterwards, “Metal is the Law” kicks in and shows the band’s three main characteristics: simple but solid riffs, vocalist Detonator (played by Bruno Sutter) singing in a high pitched, Rob Halford-like voice and silly lyrics with references to metal clichés and Brazilian pop culture references.
Because of that and their macaronic English, their lyrics can be hard to understand for a native English audience. For example, sometimes they mix plenty of Portuguese words with the suffix “-ation” like “punheta” (jerking off) and “buceta” (pussy) in “Metal Bucetation”, their exhortation to have sex instead of masturbating. And their biggest hit, “Evil Papagali”, tells the story of a fire-spitting parrot that came from Hell urging to kill, listen to metal and eat cookies mixing verses in English with a chorus in Portuguese: “Louro, louro quer biscoito! (Parrot wants cookies!)”. “Metal Milkshake” is an exception, though: it’s a mishmash of totally unrelated English words and phrases crowned by Detonator screaming “Michael Jackson!!!!”.
I’d say that the band’s originality is mostly in the lyrics, so don’t expect any revolutionary instrumentation on their part. They don’t put anything very new in that regard, but come on, few are those who put something “new” in that sense. So, the most important thing is to put out genuine, aggressive, fun stuff to make you headbang, jump and mosh. And they do that: they’ve got solid riffs, better than many pretentious and “serious” bands out there. Blondie Hammett (played by Fausto Fanti) puts out galloping ones like “Metal Bucetation” and faster, thrashier ones with some nice solos here and there in songs like “Metal Dental Destruction” (a tale about a mad dentist that blows his patient’s mouths and drinks their blood), “Cereal Metal” and “Metal Massacre Attack”.
A downside of the album, though, are the fillers. Some tracks feel unnecessary, like “The God Master” (an instrumental track with an audio from Brazilian comedian Costinha telling very dirty jokes) and “Away Doom”. But besides that, the album is a pretty consistent effort with "Evil Papagali", "Metal Milkshake", "Metal Bucetation", "Metal is the Law" and "Metal Dental Destruction" as highlights.
In Brazil, native metalheads clearly got the joke and laughed out loud with their stuff because they knew that the intention here is not to laugh at metal, but to laugh WITH it and its clichés. Life is not meant to be taken too seriously and neither is metal, and both give you plenty of stuff to have fun with, like Massacration’s debut album.
