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Soulfly.
 Soulfly vocalist and founder Max Cavalera is a dream interviewee: ask him a question and no matter how simple or straightforward it is, he'll give you a long, detailed answer that takes all manner of fascinating twists and turns. His band's latest album, 'Dark Ages', comes close on the heels of its predecessor, 'Prophecy', so it seems logical to start our conversation by asking why the new album came out so quickly.
"It just turned out that way," he admits. "I don't really plan the exact time between records, and every album's a little bit different. It relates a bit to the fact that we did a lot of touring for 'Prophecy'. We could have done a longer tour for that one, but we thought that it would be better to actually go into the studio, make a new record, which I felt we had enough material for, and then do a tour for that one, which is where we are right now; the Dark Ages Tour is just starting."
One of the most notable things about the new album is that the recording for it took place in five countries: Russia, Serbia, Turkey, France and the US. Finding the first of these almost as mysterious today as it was back in the days of the Cold War, I ask Cavalera what working there was like. "Russia was really interesting because we have a huge following there," he informs me. "I played over there with Sepultura in 1991 right after Communism fell. We had a great tour, and when I made Soulfly, I went back there. Soulfly became really popular; a lot of Russians really liked what I was doing. My wife has family in Siberia, and I've been to Omsk twice. When people get mad at you in America, they say, 'If you behave like that, I'm going to send you to Siberia!' So when I tell people there that I've been to Siberia they think I'm joking! And I'm like, 'No, I'm not joking, I've actually been there, twice!' It's like the end of the world - it's really, really far from everywhere else - but there's something cool about it, man. I'm attracted to those kinds of places; I like adventure, wild, primitive-type stuff and I meet a lot of cool people in those places."
The new album also contains some sounds of metalworkers at work in Turkey. "That was actually an accident, though," Cavalera admits. "I went to Istanbul just to record sounds of the city. The reason I went to Istanbul was that the album was called 'Dark Ages', which made me think of Constantinople, which was the centre of Christianity back then. That incident actually happened inside the Temple of Sophia Hagia. I'm walking around there recording sounds, and there were these men banging metal on metal in this huge, huge room. It sounded really cool, like weird-sounding bells, so I put it on the record. I like things like that: weird, strange recordings. I love Dead Can Dance, Peter Gabriel and a lot of dub music: things like Theatre Priest and Asian Dub Foundation. I try to bring some of that into the metal world, because there's not much of it there; for me, it's really interesting to connect those different worlds."
As for the heavy stuff on the album, a lot of this sounds reminiscent of early, thrashy Sepultura for me: an observation Cavalera is quick to concur with. "Yeah," he affirms. "Because, you know, that's me: that's the way I sing, and they're my riffs. They're on every album, but a little more so on 'Dark Ages'. It's like how if you're right-handed, you're going to be right-handed forever; I've been doing those sorts of songs since I was fifteen, living back in Brazil, and I still do them the same way now. In fact, those are actually more fun because they're really fast songs."
Something else I detected a bit of on the new album (for example, in Molotov) was punk. "Yeah, I'm into a lot of punk music," Cavalera acknowledges. "Sepultura was actually one of the very first bands that was kind of in the middle of metal and hardcore; we loved Discharge, we loved Cro-Mags, and we loved Slayer. The very first time we played in New York, we got picked up by a friend of ours who was a skinhead, and he took my brother and I to a skinhead show. It was all skinhead bands, and we were the only two people there with long hair. I told my brother, 'You know we're gonna die today, right?' But they totally respected us, which was great. And all the hardcore bands always respected the stuff we did which was really cool. I think punk and hardcore are always going to be in my music, in my blood."
James Brazel
 | 'Dark Ages' is out now through Roadrunner/UMA. |
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