Where to begin? Well, I'll start off with the drums. The snare "attack," such as it is, sounds unnatural and hyper-compressed. The whole recording is hyper-compressed - just look at the waveforms above - but the snare drum is particularly headache-inducing with its neverending, repetitive thud. Was the snare just looped throughout this album? I swear you could take a two second recording of it and just loop it over and over again for every one of the songs on this album with only occasional tempo changes, and it would fit right in save for the occasional need to insert a fill, roll, or other slight variation in play. Rolls are particularly unnatural sounding, completely missing the natural overlapping of decay that you would hear from a series of rapid-fire snare drum hits in a natural environment. This leads me to believe that the producer/engineer has either applied way too much limiting to the attack of the snare, or has sample replaced it in the mix. As a former drummer myself, I find sample replacement to be extremely distasteful and quite frankly a lazy studio cheat. And worst of all, the drum track on every one of these nine songs is essentially the exact same mind-numbingly repetitious, plodding, mega-compressed headache-fest from start to finish. Yes, this material, being uptempo 1980s thrash, calls for a high speed playing style with little time for fancy inventiveness. No, said playing style does not have to be so mechanical, and it actually wasn't in 1986. Drummer Ig(g)or Cavalera seems to be ducking the more complex playing of his original performances with this go-round. His drum parts could have been programmed into a machine in just a few minutes, and they honestly sound like they were.

On to the guitars. They sound a bit flat to my ears - is this due to the use of software plugins in the studio in lieu of miking traditional amp-distortion pedal setups? I have musician friends who insist that plugins are just as good as using physical equipment during a recording session, so perhaps not, but it's undeniable that the guitars lack any real "meatiness" or "punch" on this record. While the guitars in 1986 didn't exactly sound great, and were in fact often out of tune (!), the overall listening experience was far less stressful on my ears than what's presented here. The Cavalera guitar sound on Morbid Visions gets tiresome very, very quickly. As for the vocals, I do have to say that Max Cavalera does a very good job adapting them to the heightened aggressiveness of the new recordings. Unfortunately, the overall effect of the album as a whole is just... cacophonous and extremely tiresome, extremely quickly. It is extremely overcompressed and ridiculously loud in its production and mixing. It is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most fatiguing albums I've ever listened to in my life. And it's a crying shame, because given decent production and mastering (and Ig(g)or Cavalera putting in more effort rather than essentially phoning it in), this re-recording could have kicked some serious ass. It had the potential to rectify the horribly amateurish outcome of the 1986 recording sessions, but instead actually ends up sounding worse.

As a final note, I can't avoid pointing out the complete omission of the heretofore included Bestial Devastation EP from this Cavalera release. While I understand there is a compact disc version of the original Morbid Visions album that does not include this predecessor EP, to my knowledge nearly all CD releases of Sepultura's version of Morbid Visions have included it as an additional extra. Why was it left off the Cavalera Morbid Visions disc? I can only assume that the decision not to include it was rooted in a desire to make more money, a plan to get fans to purchase two albums where previously one would have sufficed. Given the very short running time of the Cavalera Bestial Devastation, which clocks in at a crisp twenty minutes and change, and the fact that the two releases retail for the same price despite the nearly seventeen minute difference in running times between the two (making Visions nearly twice as long as Bestial), this is really the only conclusion I can draw, and that's really a shame. The Calavera Morbid Visions disc includes bonus track "Burn the Dead," which I would like to say is a worthy extra, but it honestly isn't, and by the time you get to it, your ears will be so numbed by the endless repetitiveness of the previous eight tracks that you'll just wish the whole listening experience was over.