Rooooots!!
Today is the first opportunity for many to catch the Cavalera brothers (Max & Igor) playing on the same stage in 12 years and whilst the crowd is good it’s perhaps a little less that I was expecting. They do however come on a little early, which probably has something to do with it.
Max looks his usual self, thick dreadlocks, the cheeky grin and you know what you’re going to get with him whether it be from Nailbomb, Soulfly, Sepultura or the new outfit; this is going to be hard and heavy and so it proves. They produce a heavy wall of sound and keep it going for the whole set, which is littered with Sepultura songs and even a Nailbomb track (‘Wasting Away’). Max gets his stepson Ritchie up on stage to sing ‘Black Ark’ and he does a fine job, those who have seen Soulfly before will be no stranger to seeing him guesting on the odd track.
The pit is moving and there’s a decent flow of crowd surfers as they move through Sepultura‘s ‘Chaos AD’ featuring Dave Peters of Throwdown on vocals. The first major highlight though comes when drummer Igor, not to be outdone, gets his young son up on stage to play drums on the Sepultura classic ‘Troops of Doom’. He can only be about 13 or so but he totally nails it and the crowd go crazy! The tracks from the debut album (‘Inflikted’) sound good and certainly not out of place with the older Sepultura songs and this is surely the most consistently heavy riffs we’ve heard all weekend? There’s just no let up, it’s intense and quite simply brilliant.
After ‘Policia’ and ‘Must Kill’ comes one of the best moments of the festival as two of the founding members of Sepultura roll back the years and give a hammering rendition of ‘Roots, Bloody Roots’. The pit goes totally ape, the crowd is bouncing right to the back and it’s the perfect way to round off stage two. Excellent stuff.