Headspawn - Parasites

Just over two years after announcing Pretty Ugly People, their debut EP, the Paraíba trio Headspawn are taking a new leap in their career with the official release of their debut album. Entitled Parasites, the material is sold as a showcase that shows the group's evolution in terms of composition, cohesion and creativity.

The swinging tinkle of the triangle may seem inviting, attractive and subtly solar in appearance. However, it serves as a hypnotic device that takes the listener out of their state of consciousness and turns them into a puppet. As Alf Cantalice's guitar roars into life, providing a glimpse of a post-fire scenario and a still-flaming sky, the brute and chaos begin to resurface as J.P. Cordeiro's bass invades the melodic context with short phrases, stern features and an imposing posture. Flowing into moments in which the melody communicates a good, balanced mix between metal, stoner rock and alternative metal, Terra Solis is a strong, exciting prelude that has in the rhythm designed by Marconi Jr. the appropriation of a malemolence, a properly Brazilian swing that transcends the Northeastern aromas from infusions of xote and manguebeat that are entangled in the sound recipe.

Pungent, flaming, shrill. Dark. The introduction is full of strength, but also of anger and agony, feelings that are vented by the melodic interpretation of the guitar, which, with its riff, seems to agonize whenever it regains consciousness. As soon as Cantalice takes over the microphone, imbued with a deep, guttural vocal with a touch of drive, whose aggression and hoarseness are very much influenced by Corey Taylor's interpretative style, the song is taken over by a harshness that communicates the insertion of nu metal into the composition. With pressure, precision and notions of bitterness, The Butchers surprises with a melodic chorus that works like the eye of the hurricane, bringing a momentary, numbing calm in the midst of institutionalized chaos. With this mixture of chaos and numbness, the song brings a plot in which the political system is not only brought up as the cause of the bourgeoisie's suffering, but an industry capable of manipulating its followers in its own interests. Blinding and alienating the individual from lucidity, murder and carnage become commonplace acts for the sake of pleasure. On the other hand, The Butcher is a fierce critique of carnivorism and its culture of killing animals for food. Putting itself in the place of the farm animals, the song explores the anguish, pain and sadness of each animal taken to the slaughterhouse and brings, in the figure of the butcher, the image of a cold and insensitive individual who sees death as just a routine situation.

On its own, it brings dirt and harshness to the point of being stabbing. The guitar becomes the protagonist of a scene in which, from the melody alone, you can glimpse an inclined crowd moving up and down. With the help of the drums to give fluidity to its aggression, the melody sounds raw, raw, but curiously with signs of improvisation. With the bass an element that, even through short notes, inserts sudden shrills that induce a state of madness, the song, due to its introductory melodic setting, is very similar to the aesthetics of Forgotten, a Linkin Park track. Sour, powerful and metallic, Sinking Jetsam is a track that indirectly talks about poor hygiene conditions, but above all describes all the symptoms suffered by a patient who has contracted taenia. And in this respect, there is a lot of hatred in Cantalice's lyrical interpretation, which places the protagonist in a situation of bactericidal enslavement.

The drumming is misleading. After all, it manages to give the listener a slight sense of a carnival march while exuding an axé silhouette. On the other hand, the guitar here is even deeper and harsher, quickly detaching the listener from this fresh, sunny impression. Flowing into a metallic phrase, but curiously easy to digest even in the midst of the continuous and trotting use of the bass drum, Failure, Death & Decay presents an industrialized aesthetic whose landscape is very similar to that created by Hollywood Undead, but which is also capable of giving off impressions of unreasonable kinship, thanks to the guitar's sonar, with the sound of Protect The Land, a single by System Of A Down. Energetic and imposing, Failure, Death & Decay discusses the arrogance, futility and consumerism of the individual in the modern age while, paradoxically, presenting the afterlife as a time when nothing that has been reaped in earthly life by following such types of behavior will be able to bring any sense of fullness. This is how Headspawn sees people who behave in such a way as doomed to loneliness, oblivion and annulment.

The horizon is dark and terrifying. Fear grips the individual at the mere sight of a crowd on an apparently funeral march. As if building the prelude to a massacre. With a strong melodic base and capable of recalling in the listener's mind some of Slipknot's more melodious songs, such as Before I Forget and Duality, Everybody Hates Somebody features Cantalice moving between clean and guttural tones, while illustrating a plot that criticizes all those who support authoritarian, intolerant and ultra-conservative rulers. It's not hard to see that there's a certain viscerality and even an autobiographical feel to the singer's lyrical verses, as he expresses his disgust and disbelief at all those who have knowingly placed their trust in a figure governed by rejection dressed up as hatred, fascism and prejudice.

The scent of the sertão, the smell of cattle, the buzzing of flies, the warmth of the rising sun and the tinkling of cows' bells are all sounds and sensations that go beyond the bucolic sound of the guitar. What's even more curious is that the bass twang of the berimbau, instead of bringing joy, brings ominousness and a latent sense of warning that makes Fili Caatinga an instrumental and folk interlude that shows, scenographically, even more about the origin of Headspawn.

The threshold is placed as the scenic foreground. Crude, severe, dark and sour, its atmosphere is so disgusting that it makes the listener unconsciously feel the texture of the rocks, glimpse the darkness and smell the contaminating aroma of sulphur. Flirting with death metal, although in the first moments the drums and bass are the protagonists, Ghost Of Myself is another Parasites song that, due to its rhythmic-melodic nature, contributes to a kind of body hypnotism in which the viewer shakes their body in a hallucinogenic state. It is with a sense of hatred that Ghost Of Myself talks about extreme introspection and the vision of death as a balm for escaping problems and suffering. The track is where the depths of the darkness of the unconscious and insanity are brought up as places of encouragement for a condemned soul.

Harsh, serious and with strident notions. The introduction becomes curiously more infectious when the drums come in with choppy phrases, but with extreme pressure, and you can see the force with which Jr. strikes the parts of the instrument. With its dark aromas, You Are manages to be simultaneously stunning, numbing, schizophrenic and intoxicating.  Even so, it manages to be contagious through its narrative that encourages persistence, perseverance and hope, while questioning society's blind conformism to a manipulative reality of satisfaction with little.

Their awakening is dark. Dark, sneaky and cynical, the atmosphere created by the first sounds is nothing short of dark. Brought Into This World is lost in the depths of doom metal and heavy metal, a mixture that, judging by its aesthetics, communicates a great influence from Black Sabbath. In its introductory second half, the track features sequentially precise drums, a harsh, stabbing guitar and a new blend: a hint of hardcore and thrash metal. Exuding a purely metallic essence, Brought Into This World is yet another Parasites work that manages to build melodious and attractive melodic landscapes, even though it's flooded with brutality. In the meantime, the track talks about the feeling of rejection in the face of social-massive manipulation against anything that doesn't follow pre-established standards. Brought Into This World is the disappearance of a soul consigned to solitude and institutionalized oblivion.

Strident, but still with notions of swing, its dawn is short, but denotes large doses of torpor and bitterness that, together, build an environment divided between anguish and madness. Full of groove in the midst of a linearity that is not uncomfortable, The Grotesque Factory Of Files, as well as talking about death in an open way and from the point of view of its irreversible fatality, talks about hunger and its consequent hallucinatory and agonizing effects. Not least because Cantalice's interpretation suggests the beginnings of schizophrenia based on the absence of nutrition.

He is able to mix regionalism with the global. Parasites, with its curiously melodic brutality, brings a more mature, more balanced and more consistent Headspawn. Harshly critical of modern culture and society, the material is full of strong opinions and pertinent questions about life, death and pain.

There is no drama. Although many themes sound like a prerequisite for unbridled melodic suffering, the power trio uses sadness, absurdity and the absence of conformism to create harsh, aggressive, poignant, flaming and lancinating phrases to express discontent that wouldn't carry the same weight if they were only expressed in words.

Talking about hunger, pain, death, loneliness, carnivorism, falsehood, arrogance and poor hygiene conditions with depth, place of speech and cohesion. Parasites, above all, is the representation of a people who are often consigned to oblivion, annulment and moral devaluation.

To create and make the melody as firm, strong and lacerating as possible, Headspawn teamed up with Victor Hugo Tragino for the mixing task. With his help, Parasites moved freely through hardcore, industrial, thrash metal, death metal, heavy metal, doom metal, stoner rock, folk, alternative metal, alternative rock, xote and manguebeat.

Rounding off the technical scope is the cover art. Signed by Wildner Lima, it features four babies with endemonic features aggressively eating a sloth. Surrounded by a dark scenario, the work already brings up a lot of questions about environmental neglect and a cannibalistic sense that, in a way, are at the heart of various dialogues proposed on the album.

Released on 11/17/2023 in an independent way, Parasites is Headspawn at their best. Balanced, cohesive, precise and consistent, the trio have made the album not just a socio-political piece of material, but a product that transfers regionalism to a global level, thus making it represent an entire layer of the population that has been denied institutional devaluation and annulment disguised as inclusion.