Critic's evaluation
Coming just over a year after the announcement of The Limit Of Thrash, their first EP, Sacrifix have finally released their second studio album and successor to World Decay 19. Composed and recorded in the first half of 2022, Killing Machine comes with a proposal to have more diverse lyrical themes than its predecessor.
Frank Gasparotto's guitar is melodramatic, pained, tearful. Despite this, his pain is drenched in an imposing rationality focused on overcoming with refinements of maturity, traits well drawn out by the bass-strident explosions of Kexo's bass. With the precision and density with which Gustavo Piza's drums shape the rhythm, the song, with its air of delicacy but intense gloomy torpor, ends up exuding a melodic structure that flirts with power metal and heavy metal very similar to that made by Iron Maiden. Then, after the agonizing high-pitched shrieks of the guitars, what was once a tearful conjuncture called Age Of Doom now takes on an angry, tight-fisted appearance. Between the harsh aggression of the guitars, the strident corpulence of the bass and the force of the ricocheting drums, the listener is faced with thrash metal that exudes revolt. Reminiscent of Metallica's heyday, Killing Machine is narrated by an acidic, raspy, but dry and fast tone. It's Gasparotto now adding notes of bitterness to a song that tells of a dystopian, chaotic world ruled by an underworld figure who feeds on the blood, pain and humiliation of others. It's like the soundtrack that represents the personification of death: inevitable, literal, cold and calculating.
Sudden, fast and with a stunning debauchery. Unlike the previous song, in which everything was built up in a soft and gradual way, this track already dawns with a libidinously agonizing punch in which the lead guitar enjoys its virility in its phrases that mix hard rock with heavy metal. Brutally provocative, the intro is notable for its pressure-packed base spurned by incessant double bass rides until, as with Age Of Doom/Killing Machine, a final scream signals the change of plot. Returning to acid and sour thrash metal, Gasparotto now appears between a hoarseness reminiscent of Lemmy Kilmister's typical timbre and his standard sour look. Guided By God, with its harsh intensity, is a song that plays a curious joke. While in the previous song the figure of death was even verbalized in its carnal and cannibalistic instincts, Guided By God, while proposing liberation involving the comfort of the idea that with faith all is forgiven, brings the figure of God as an omnipresent and authoritarian being who shows his wrath to all who oppose him. That's why Guided By God, with a stunned, desperate and angry second solo by Marco Nunes, raises similar questions to those Myles Kennedy raised in ABIII, Alter Bridge's album, which are the questioning of faith and its validity.
Beginning with a melody very reminiscent of that of Sad But True, a Metallica single, this song dawns with a sour, ricocheting punch. Aggressive in its uncontrollable harshness, the song, like Guided By God, flirts with the sound of death metal while maturing into an intense and dirty product. Full of double pedals inserting a trotting, precise cadence into the melodic base, Reality Is Lost is a critique not only of the capitalist conglomerate, but of the corporate culture of seeing employees as numbers, machines, and not human beings. To this coldness and lack of empathy, Sacrifix exposes its view that corporatism manipulates its disciples to the point of making them forget who they are in order to assume the truths of the industrial mother.
It's a mixture of pleasure and agony. Or rather, it's an agonizing pleasure. It's with such a groan that the lead guitar welcomes the listener into the new scenario. With a dirty and rough base in its proposal for a fusion between hard rock and thrash metal, the song ends up evolving into a second introductory section that sounds, at first, like a warning and, later, like the execution of a funeral march that, here, has no drama, but rather cynicism. Sweating stridency and harshness, its heat is intense and fatalistic, like meteors announcing the end. It's no wonder that Gasparotto enters with a demonic voice like that of a deadly elf, making March To Kill the revelation of an individual betrayed by his peers. A portrait of how passivity can be detrimental to the sense of community.
The lead guitar, with its quick, circular movements, is like a pendulum swinging from side to side to hypnotize the listener. In the background, the base guitar comes in short roars from behind the rocks, like a predator on the prowl to catch its prey. As the deaf and dry drums beat along with the bass, we see a bloodied individual being carried across the dirt floor. When, all of a sudden, the melody enters a constant acceleration, a trotting rhythm and an aggressive melody, death metal and hardcore become part of Ancient Aggression's sound recipe alongside thrash. Between impregnating sour textures and a cutting harshness, the track focuses on the fact that there are people who hinder the social and spiritual progress of the planet. Perceived as sinners, these individuals are like deliverers of death prowling the surface in search of lust and lasciviousness. Something that must be extirpated if progress is to be maintained.
Without any whining or sense of self-preservation, the song begins with a syncopated, low-pitched, shrill and dirty burst. Between hardcore and thrash metal, the melody is precise, but also harsh and intense in its stabbing essence. Between the use of the double kick drum at the end of each phrase, with its dry trot, raspy and guttural tones share the stage with a new performer. Murillo Leite, transfigured like a being from the shadows come to warn of the inevitable, transforms Raped Democracy, as its name suggests, into a fierce critique of the capitalist model. Brought to life as something strengthened by the sole interest in profit and the manipulation of its loyal and blind servants, the song even fits in with the same rejection of Reality Is Lost. Its bravery is rounded off by a solo performed by Maurício Amaral that represents the anger and absurdity of the way capitalism is executed, a way that makes the solo even sound like a regurgitating agony.
Its tempo is slow, dark, low and crawling. Introducing doom metal into Killing Machine's melting pot of sound, Dark Zone presents a chaotic scenario, but not one of war or confrontation. A Permian, acidic, dry and arid landscape forms until it erupts in raging jets of lava throughout its ecosystem. Along with the desperation of the calculating drums, the guitars bring their aggressive silhouettes which, in Dark Zone, provide the basis for a discourse repressing falsehood and highlighting the resentment presented in beauteous garb. On the other hand, the Dark Zone can also symbolize an individual's attempts to hide their emotional fragility so as not to communicate that they are going through a troubled time. The dark zone, in this sense, is simply the unreturned access to depression.
There's no time to think. Like Raped Democracy, it starts with a punch. Emphasizing the machine-gun bitterness, the melody that matures is that of a thrash metal of average cadence, but based on the typical tremolo picking technique. With great aesthetic familiarity with Painkiller, a Judas Priest single, thanks mainly to the way Gasparotto's voice resonates in its sharp, sour tone, Thrash Again is a track that even flirts with lo-fi ambience due to the intense sizzling effect provided by the opening of the kick drum. Of the whole of Killing Machine, Thrash Again is the song with the most aggressive, harshest, angriest and bloodiest tone. Within all its intense bloodlust, the song, like Raped Democracy and Reality Is Lost, has an essence of criticism of the political system. Inciting anarchy disguised as freedom of expression, Thrash Again is the perfect veneration of Satan that is rounded off by a stunning solo in its libidinous hallucination.
Flashy. Dark. Obscure. Gasparotto's ripping roar is like the awakening of a bestial figure in the midst of dark, unhealthy caves. Making the listener's heart bubble, pulse and leap into their mouth with its intensely trotting rhythm thanks to the incessant use of double pedals, Rotten is the most brutal melody. Dirty and shrill, it exudes despair as it brings an exodus governed by agony and fear. Following the same path as Raped Democracy, Reality Is Lost and Thrash Again, Rotten has a political slant, but here the criticism falls on the systemic neglect of society as a whole and on greed. It's insanity fueled by the thirst for power. The rotten side of any nation's leader.
He is like the shadow. Like a roar echoing in the midst of abyssal darkness. It's like dust choking the listener as a bestial being salivates at the first scent of blood. It's like the flash of lightning breaking through the blackness of night. Killing Machine presents a Sacrifix full of rage, insanity and a hunger for blood in its outbursts of political rejection.
In keeping with the bitterness, harshness, acidity and stridency that are standard in the trio's sound, the album is mostly fast, intense and bloody. Even so, it's curious how the group relies on lascivious, stabbing obscurity to incite the listener to think about issues of the mind, faith, society and the political system in a profoundly cavalier way.
To give weight and consistency to these proposals for dialog, Sacrifix enlisted Nunes as mixer. With him, Killing Machine not only shows the group's maturity, but also an improvement in their thrash metal vein. After all, along with this subgenre, the album brings a sound recipe that includes hard rock, hardcore, doom metal, death metal, heavy metal and even power metal.
Rounding off the technical scope is the cover art. Signed by Alcides Burn, it features lines and an urban-chaotic landscape very similar to the one done by Márcio Aranha for World Decay 19. Dark and almost apocalyptic, Burn's work draws attention to the fact that it features a machine with a cyborg-like corpse in a way that incites discussion about the presence of technology in society, with special reference to artificial intelligence. And here, the robot is presented as a common and invincible enemy.
Released on 08/19/2023 in an independent way, Killing Machine is a product that highlights Sacrifix's maturity and the conscious way in which it deals with more subjective issues, such as diseases of the mind and social ills. On the album, the listener is invited to immerse themselves in the underworld to think, amidst textures of the most varied excesses, about the path of society in the midst of carnage and manipulative political systems.
