GO AHEAD AND DIE – Unhealthy Mechanisms

RELEASE YEAR: 2023

BAND URL: https://facebook.com/GoAheadAndDieBand

It seems ages since the legendary Massimiliano Antonio “Max” Cavalera, the (in)famous ex-Sepultura and current Soulfly frontman, aided by his younger son, Igor Amadeus Cavalera (vocals, guitar, bass) as well as Khemmis’ drummer Zach Coleman, released the explosive bombshell of Go Ahead And Die’s eponymous²⁰²¹ probably because so much happened in the country both I and Max call ours. The political turmoil, fueled by a rise of openly antidemocratic aspirations of a former TV show celebrity who had accidentally become the 45th U.S. President unleashing untold misery on the old Union and who had inspired an insurrection to stay in power after he had lost the re-election, showed through that record which was, like a 100 crooked Polish cops at the bottom of the ocean, a good start. The album took me back to Nailbomb’s excellent Point Blank¹⁹⁹⁴ which I alluded to in my review (4.5) but it wasn’t quite that good, likely because it was all about raw energy and furious anger expressed in the choice of the name – the phrase “f@#k you” translated into Japanese for “あなたをファック” and “Anata o fakku” literally meaning “go ahead and die” (GAAD). I mean, could you get more savage than the World War II Japanese kamikaze?

Two years after, with most of the boots of the insurrection in jail and some of the suits of the insurrection soon facing the prosecution for their democracy busting crimes, and Zach Coleman replaced by Johnny Valles in GAAD, the time is ripe for the second Go Ahead And Die album called Unhealthy Mechanisms²⁰²³ released on October 20th via Nuclear Blast Records. With Max no friend of the former administration, this album feels and sounds like the perfect soundtrack to the rapid degredation of the American Republic into a narcissistic circus thanks to the lawless allegiance to the mob boss insurrectionist from the party who once called themselves the party of Lincoln, law, justice and the family values, all of which they now openly and shamessly scorn. To me, at least, they are the titular unhealthy mechanisms, in a sort of understatement of the year, even if Max said it was about mental illness, and, after all, maybe the two ideas aren’t that far of? As for Max, he no longer borrows from death metal, he now is death metal, or, better yet, he hasn’t been this death metal since Sepultura’s Morbid Visions¹⁹⁹⁶, as he screams and, yes, GROWLS like a wounded bear. Indeed, morbid visions of Obituary’s Slowly We Rot¹⁹⁸⁹ burst through M.D.A. (Most Dangerous Animal) bolstered by the creepy as Bill Cosby sample of a confession of some unidentified serial murderer at its onset, there rises a Behemoth in the grindcorish “Chasm” and ancient Gorefest, Death, Napalm Death (a lot) and Paradise Lost fight for primacy in “Blast Zone” as “people die every day from the wars that they wage”, but Max never forgets his Soulfly Roots on the groovy and supercatchy “Drug-O-Cop” (hey, that’s a second indictment of crooked cops in this review, so much for law and order, eh?), the songs meaner, fuller, better in every way with frequent ebbs and flows and melody that’s one hand in the early Meshuggah and the other in The Cure’s Disintegration¹⁹⁹⁸ at its most creative with genres visited and re-visited like the Spanish Canary Islands (oh, hell, just count the tags under the review!).

Again, Max affirms what was already true for the predecessor: the times have not gotten better but worse, old problems all-encompassed by a deadly global pandemic and the open domestic partisan treason to boot, and that’s just the U.S. because the 41:21 minute 10 track record sessions may have already known the savage Russian invasion of Ukraine (which is only a 1000 km ride from where I’m writing this) but could not have anticipated the recent Israeli-Hamas hostilities or the signs of another brewing world epidemic. The record may still be very chaotic and not sound as polished as Machine Head’s extremely seminal Burn My Eyes¹⁹⁹⁴ or Biohazard’s State Of The World Address¹⁹⁹⁴ but that kind of fury would sound antiquated today. In short, if good metal is forged from bad times, very good metal from the apparent end times and let that be the best testimony for the strength and the appeal of Unhealthy Mechanisms²⁰²³.