As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I loved Sepultura when I was in high school. But this album eluded me for many years and it was the last of the Max Cavalera albums that I picked up. It was not until well into my first job after law school that I finally managed to track it down. And by then, my obsession with Sepultura had long since passed. So, it just did not make the impact that many of the band's early albums made. Add to that the kind of crappy production, at least on the copy that I picked up and there were a few reasons why this one really did not make much of an impact.
Schizophrenia is a transition album of sorts. It is Sepultura's sophomore full-length, arriving just a year after the proto-death metal stomp of Morbid Visions. That album helped pave the way for not only death metal, but also black metal. Two years later came Beneath the Remains, which is the band's most straightforward brutal thrash metal album. So Schizophrenia sort of exists in a state of limbo between the two sounds. It features the best of both sounds with the raw animal aggression of Morbid Visions and the uncompromising brutality of Beneath the Remains.
In addition, there are some terrific, classic Sepultura songs on this release. It features pit classics like "Escape to the Void" and "R.I.P. (Rest in Pain)". But it also contains the spellbinding instrumental "Inquisition Symphony", which remains one of the band's most ambitious songs from their early years.
This album is finally sinking in more these days. It is a fantastic raw and brutal album and exemplifies the amazing talent that Sepultura had in the early days. It is a shame that Sepultura spent so much time chasing trends. A few more albums like this would have been much preferred to the nu-metal direction the band took in the mid 1990's.
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