Soulfly - Ritual

Max Cavalera and his main project since his departure from Sepultura need no introduction at this point. Eleven albums in, Max’s prolific output often seems to go unnoticed, rivaling even the mighty Devin Townsend. But Max’s constant outpouring of music through Soulfly, Cavalera Conspiracy, and other side projects like Killer Be Killed does lead to the natural drawback of him being spread so thin that he doesn’t seem to really perfect any album he’s working on. He just gets it to the level that has come to be expected of him and then moves on to the next one. He’s exceeded those expectations a few times like on the tribal nu metal classic, Primitive, and most recently on Soulfly’s return to Max’s death metal foundations on 2012’s Enslaved. But aside from a few stacked gems, the reasonable expectation for most of Soulfly’s output has been generally average basic groove metal, especially since the band’s move away from their one unique element around the time of Dark Ages: the tribal music influences. Consequently, I’m not surprised that Max opted to tease a return of Soulfly to his tribal roots (slash Sepultura’s tribal Roots). It was going to happen eventually, but Ritual feels like such an incomplete reintroduction of that approach, with some of the residual Behemoth-imitation from 2015’s Archangel leaking into this project, and the band only sprinkling a few moments of Roots-esque material in a couple of places. On one hand I’m glad Max didn’t just try to lazily rehash Prophecy or Primitive, but Ritual is still plagued by a deep sense of unoriginality, and hardly the concentration of tribal sounds Max had teased.

The chant on the opening title track is something so annoying I can’t fathom how Max thought to let this get pressed to the album, much less give it the responsibility of lead single.

Randy Blythe’s feature on “Dead Behind the Eyes” really makes the already NWOAHM groove of the song sound like such a transparent imitation of Randy’s band.

“The Summoning” is a more tangibly furious performance from the band with some tempo-dynamic guitar rhythms establishing infectious, head-nodding grooves. And with Max reaching into his upper shouting register and the triplet riffing across the song, it sounds almost, dare I say it, Meshuggah-inspired.

“Evil Empowered” is a pretty uneventful death/groove metal standard cut for Soulfly, featuring a perplexing half-committed attempt at the sort of hardcore breakdown Code Orange have made so repopularized lately.

Ross Dolan’s feature on “Under Rapture” is perhaps the only thing spicing it up during its first half, as the band coasts through a rather basic triplet palm-muted riff-driven two-section movement until the death metal breakdown of sorts at the end.

The eerie acoustic intro of “Demonized” takes me back to albums like Schizophrenia and Arise. The rest of the song reverts rather quickly back to

The tribal percussion and chanting makes its quick appearance on the first few and last few seconds of “Blood on the Streets”, but the thrashy death metal it weirdly sandwiches isn’t some of the band’s most inspired.

The on-off riffing, quick pull-off soloing, and harmonic accents of “Bite the Bullet” are nice, novel features for the album, but not enough to lift the song’s unimaginative structure and the chorus’ titular refrain above overall mediocrity.

The last heavy track, “Feedback!” takes it back to the party thrash of 1983, which was similar a refreshing choice Machine Head made with “Razorblade Smile” on Catharsis, but here it just feels like it disrupts the flow of the album.

As per Soulfly tradition, the cooldown track, “Soulfly XI”, ends the album on a serene, instrumentally unique note. Featuring a savory sax lead and soulful acoustic picking backed by hand-drummed bongos and echoed choir vocals, it’s a satisfying continuation of the Soulfly tradition that makes sense and good use of the album’s title.

As much as I like Max, I wasn’t expecting this album to blow me away, and due to some clunky, if not recycled writing it didn’t really surprise me. On the plus side, though, Soulfly sound more intentional than they did on Savages, and less copy-cat-ish than they did on Archangel. The production on this album is certainly some of the most flattering Soulfly has had as of late, with the instruments all coming through clearly and highlighting the tightness of the band’s performance at high speed. Speaking of respectable performances, Max must be one proud-ass dad, with Zyon making a notably assertive presence behind the kit. I’d say this is probably Max’s best release since Enslaved, between this and his other bands. All in all, I’m pretty much just as pleased as I was hoping to be with this one, not more, not less.