Both were pivotal albums for me at different times amid my youth, and both bore awesome influence upon their own respective scenes.

The self-titled record by the big "D" has greater emotional resonance, though I don't really relate to it these days. Whereas the Sep epic remains among my favorite proto-death records ever snarled.

Ultimately, I think the songwriting is better on the Deliverance debut--insomuch as melodic sensibility, and artful balance among brutality is concerned; the songs are to-the-point, reasonably well-crafted and well-played; the vocals have an impassioned, untrained charm. But some songs seem quite ham-fisted lyrically at times, immersed too deeply in its own presumptive obligation to evangelize. ("No Time" reads like a Chick Tract, and the not-quite-rap on "No Love" makes me groan.) The production seems raw and muffled now and then; I always have to turn it up, and tweak the damn EQ). And their musical odes to long-time influences (Queensryche and Metallica, et al) betrays more than their youth at times. It's a wonderful debut--don't get me wrong--but it's obvious that the ball had only just begun to roll.

Sepultura's classic rager features sharp and crisp--if not a bit compressed at times--production by a young Scott Burns, who would rarely do better again. But per his tendency, the drums and bass are sent off to the corner like disobedient children, while the lead guitar shrieks holes into your headphones. The music is brutal, technical, and huge: Songs like "Inner Self" and "Mass Hypnosis" still hold up, and rank among the best the band would write. But the lyrics are almost "Engrish," and read conceptionally on a seemingly ninth-grade level. You can't enjoy them unironically unless you're actively smoking pot behind a high school gym, or growing pubes and only now discovered girls. And the arrangements--while intense and technically proficient--are hardly catchy, with exceptions intermittant, sparse at best. The vocals are equally impassioned, but unremarkable.

They're evenly matched in their own ways--equally wondrous and inept in tandem measure. I love them both--I really do--but not without a skip button and at least a double-tumbler of Jim Beam.


)+(

POST SCRIPT: Thoughts On The Alternating Supremacies, Frequencies, And Tendencies of Deliverance/Sepultura.


It isn't quite a rivalry, but I'm sure that we can make it one. Let's go.


Despite the diplomatic fence-straddle of my previous assertions, I am fiercly inclined to add--and aggressively emphasize--that Deliverance matured a good deal faster than Sepultura in the remarkably short span between successive albums, and stayed vital and creative much, much longer. It should be noted that while both bands made creative strides with every effort, Sepultura frequently took three or more years between releases, and often with support from major labels to finance their development; whereas Deliverance cranked 'em out like clockwork summer after summer, with only the hurried encouragement of a genre-specific independent, a label only "major" within its limited demographic...yet, the band made natural progressions into unnatural progress, with each year yielding the same level of successive evolution and refinement of vision that a band like Sepultura took three times as long to produce.

Just two years after the debut, JPB2 could craft a better composition hungover on the toilet than Max & Igor with a ProTools kit and speed. Weapons Of Our Warfare, though admittedly a different sort of beast, could easily hold its own against Arise. "Weapons," "Flesh & Blood," and "Slay The Wicked" still hold up (as would "Rescue" if it surfaced as a bonus on the disc) and feel every bit as savage and ferocious as "Desperate Cry," "Arise," and "Dead Embrionic Cells." And as mid-90's transition discs go, Stay Of Execution was more consistent and inventive than the over-reaching hit-and-miss that made up Chaos AD...and Learn sounds far less dated in 2008--though unleashed in '93--than Roots did only two years down the road from its '96 release.

Seriously...a record that sounds like Learn could be released even today, on a reasonably-sized label, and draw fans across the board; and Learn came out in 1993. A record such as Roots--with it's clunky proto-NuMetal howl, thumpy bass, and thick, murky detuned guitars--would draw little more than yawns from any moderately discerning fans, and derision from most critics; and yet, this was considered "cutting edge" upon release, and would not reach shelves until a full three years past Learn.

Also, consider this: Sepultura--their formative Jairo-led era notwithstanding--had the benefit of a relatively static line-up from Schizophrenia (their first major effort to achieve widespread release) up through Roots (their last major effort to achieve substantial impact). Inversely, Deliverance--with rare exception--never released an album with the exact same line-up twice, with multiple major personnel shifts even between "key" albums released during the peak of their career. Sepultura suffered in every conceivable measure following the departure of Max Cavalera--their first substantial line-up change since the dawn of their Roadrunner/Sony era; while Deliverance ironically bled out their most erratic revolving-door of players during what is most generally regarded as the band's most consistent period (89-93).

Furthermore, while fan opinion wildly varies regarding the band's myriad genre leaps, it often seems (at least to me) that critical consensus cites the post-Learn catalog as largely (if not vastly) underrated, and/or at very least, misunderstood...with one record after another finally achieving post-mortem vindication from old fans finally warming to the albums' respective eccentricities (given wider frames of reference over time), or new fans raised on a wider range of styles (and thus less biased toward the band's straight-forward past).

On the other hand, it seems (again, at least to me) equally widely accepted--be it by virtue of the band's dwindling fanbase or the snide wanking motions of nonplussed critics--that Sepultura's post-Roots catalog is a decade-long dead horse, generally dismissable, a dead name in a dying tongue of drop-D tuning and disingenuous post-hardcore riffs.

This is not to say that Deliverance is a better band than Sepultura; it is merely to say that Deliverance have a quirkier but ultimately more satisfying musical catalog, whereas Sepultura were frequently quite important, but never for any longer than it took a thousand bands to replicate their last advance and drive it--firmly, deeply--right into the ground. And neither band ever seemed to know when it was finally time to call it something else.


)+(