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RIPPER “Towards Rebirth”
RIPPER “Towards Rebirth”
By Dr. Abner Mality
A RIPPER indeed! This is the kind of scorching death-thrash a lot of us have been waiting for since the early 90’s. If you were a fan of classic SEPULTURA in the days of “Schizophrenia” and “Beneath The Remains”, your train has come in at last. I wish “Towards Rebirth” would have been SEPULTURA’s follow up to “Beneath The Remains”!
This whole damn thing slams from first to last. The production is absolutely immaculate in every regard…the guitars bite like sharks, but it’s the amazing juicy bass sound and cannon-like drums that elevate this to a stratospheric level. It is one of the best produced extreme metal records I have ever heard.
It doesn’t reinvent the wheel (an overused phrase, but often accurate) but it just takes that wheel and makes it work better than ever before. After an oldschool analog synth intro “The Secular Awakening”, we are off to the races with “World Of Darkness” and this motherfucker is 100% in the vein of “Mass Hypnosis” and “innerself” with killer arpeggios and a lot of great “curling” riffs that will loosen your neck in a hurry. RIPPER plays with a burning fury! I love that fat and bouncy bass bubbling beneath the riffs! And dueling guitar solos will bring tears to your eyes with memories of a sound many thought had passed forever.
The energy level stays high on the title track and “Final Hologram”. They are going for it like SLAYER on “Hell Awaits” and KREATOR on “Terrible Certainty”. There is an almost imperceptible drop in intensity on “Into the Coldness of the Land of the Dead” and “The Source Exterminator” but things level back up with the amazing thrash-strumental “The Secret Dawn” and then your brain will explode with the oozing power and death metal crunch of “The End of Universe”, which gets my vote for song of the year so far. The album ends with one tiny misstep, as “Procession To Eternal Rest” ends the album with a short and rather “typical” track that should have been in the middle of the record or left off altogether.
If you ever had any feeling for the classic years of SEPULTURA, SLAYER, KREATOR and MORBID ANGEL, you need to get RIPPER’s “Towards Rebirth”, it’s that good!
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