(Erstwhile NCS writer TheMadIsraeli returned to us with a review earlier this week, and he’s already back again, this time writing about a new album by Brazil’s Nervosa that was released in April by Napalm Records.)
I know the band we’re reviewing today is Nervosa, but I just need you guys to take a detour with me, okay? We’re doing a Tarantino sort of introduction here. It will come together with time. I want to talk about Arch Enemy first.
We’re talking about Arch Enemy because I love Arch Enemy. Well, mostly… The Johann Liiva era of Black Earth, Stigmata, and Burning Bridges is arguably still the strongest first three-record run of any of the Gothenburg bands during the ‘90s. If I make a list of my top 100 albums of all time, there’s more than one Arch Enemy record in there, including even the Gossow era for a time or two. Their music was sonic indignation. You felt this unhinged lashing out at the world and all of the unfairness of it in everything they wrote, on top of first-class guitar work both from a riff-writing and a lead-playing standpoint.
I ate and breathed this band for a long time. Then Rise Of The Tyrant came out, and while it’s a solid record, it’s the start of a very noticeable slide into complacency and just… you could tell Michael Ammot was in full careerist mode.
Photo Credit: Akis Zaralis
Then we had War Eternal, which was the debut album of their switch to vocalist Alissa White-Gluz. War Eternal is in the top 5 of their discography and it is one of the best things they’ve ever written. After that though? I don’t know what happened, but the passion, intensity, and hunger was vanishing. Arch Enemy is a “brand” now, a husk to me. They got fucking Jeff Loomis and somehow it was the worst and most boring album they ever made. No one seems to be carrying the flag for “Will To Power” any more.
So, one move you can make in the metal sphere, and well in any sphere of art, is you can seize the opportunity of one band becoming complacent and take the crown of their sonic identity from them. I’m often a fan of “X-like” or “clone of Y” bands. It’s fun to see what other bands do to make themselves distinct while paying tribute to a sound they obviously love on a hyperfixated level. I think it’s legitimate art even if a lot of people might disagree. Those disagreements often come from the (in my opinion toxic) idea that all art must somehow be totally original and new and never-been-done-before to be legitimate. This seems like a boring existence if that is all that can spark your attention and passion. The beauty of life itself is often in the nuance and in the degrees.
Now we come to Nervosa. Their latest album Slave Machine is Prika Amaral writing her version of a peak-of-their-Gossow-era prime Arch Enemy album and it fucking rules and rips man. Now of course, this isn’t a tribute album. It’s got Nervosa DNA all over it, it’s considerably more vicious and unconcerned with the pomp and circumstance that modern Arch Enemy has become obsessed with, and all it cares about is “do the riffs make you pissed as fuck, sad as fuck, a combination of both, or some nebulous other-state in between?” — and they do.
This is also a pretty impressive lane-change for Prika and Nervosa as a project because while, yes, this is still a death/thrash album, the very explicit melodic death metal pivot, while not sacrificing that heft Nervosa has, really sticks out here. I’m told by fellow NCS writer DGR that their previous album Jailbreak started to kind of tease at this direction and I haven’t listened to it. I’ll have to go back and see. I don’t have the previous album for context in my memory so I have an almost kind of fresh-faced perspective here.
Where Nervosa stand out in the ways that prevent them from getting outright pigeon-holed into copying Arch Enemy is a commitment to straying away from fluff and excess. There are no constant dual-guitar epic big choruses, and there’s a distinct channeling of Carcass-like energy with grooves and spider-like fidgeting on the fretboard that brings to mind Heartwork in many ways. It’s more, as I implied earlier, direct.
Slave Machine is even by Nervosa standards oddly efficient and clean. There’s no compositional excess here; not a single song has a single riff or solo or anything else that could’ve been cut and also none that could realistically be added to either. That’s the sign of a song to me that is REALLY well written. If it can stand on its own to such a degree that neither addition nor subtraction would improve it, that is a band that at least for that album is at the peak of their craft.
But if I’m being honest, I can say all the words I want, but the lead single and title track is all the avocation this record needs for itself. It is rare you get an album this precise, clean, efficient, and overpowering in a package like this. It’s got epic emotive melody, filthy grooves, and atonal sludge that eats flesh, and when it’s fast it’s driving 200 MPH on the Autobahn on a suicide mission.
I like this album a lot, as you can tell. I liked Nervosa to begin with. I don’t know what they’ll do from here but, I’ll take more of this on the next album if it’s what Prika and gang are feeling.
https://napalmrecords.us/collections/nervosa
https://nervosa-brazil.bandcamp.com/album/slave-machine
https://www.nervosaofficial.com/
https://www.facebook.com/nervosa