Once again, as with the Morbid Visions remake, the cover art on the new version of Schizophrenia has been reconceived as a clear upgrade over the original 1987 design. In this case, though, I'm not convinced that the new artwork actually represents an upgrade. This may come across as a hot take and nitpick, but in my opinion the new cover has a "drawn in study hall with a ballpoint pen" feel to it. The shakiness of the line art just strikes me as a bit too amateurish rather than something that's supposed to be brooding, dark, and imposing. I understand that the new style is meant to convey a loss of grip of reality, but it just looks ugly to me. And this contrast between the original, cleaner lines and these newer, jarring and overly intense squiggles speaks directly to what I see as the crucial difference in approach between these two versions of the album: one is comparatively unsophisticated but sincere, and the other is massively, unyieldingly overdriven and overbearing.

The Cavalera re-recording sounds absolutely horrible, with all the same sonic issues and shortcomings as the one which preceded it. As on Morbid Visions, the drums sound completely unnatural to me, not just hyper-compressed but also likely sample replaced, with an artificial sounding lack of natural decay during rolls and fills on the snare. The constant, seemingly quantized thud of the snare drum gets super fatiguing well before the end of the first real song, "From the Past Comes the Storms," and drummer Ig(g)or Cavalera again sounds like he's ducking some of the more complex drum patterns he employed decades earlier with Sepultura. This time, at least, he does seem to be trying a bit harder. The vocals are well performed and fit in well with the more aggressively postured attitude of the performance, but they're mixed too low. And, worst of all, the sound of staticky distortion runs rampant across this entire album, with everything so overdriven in the mix that it would make even Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel want to cover his ears. I cannot overstate just how awful this album is to listen to, sonically. This is a bitter pill to swallow given that the performances as presented are actually a dramatic improvement over the originals... IF you mentally strip away a million layers of overproduction, a cripplingly heavy-handed application of compression, and absolutely insane volume levels. The guitars are a sludgy, overdriven, massively distorted mess, and those mind-numbing drums are way too prominent in the mix. In fact, the drum sound is the one thing that sticks out the most to me when trying to listen to this stinking turd of a CD. The original Schizophrenia is certainly no audiophile's "go to" disc, but it's way easier to listen to and enjoy than this.

As a side note, there seems to have been a lack of quality control with the re-recorded version of this album. The first selection ("Intro") is not included at all in the track listing, even though it serves as a lead-in to the first song and comprises the actual first track on the CD. Thus, only nine tracks are listed on the packaging when there are actually ten, with every track number as listed being off by one. Listed track #1 is actually track #2, and so forth, from the outset all the way to the end of the album. In addition, the reimagined and improved recording of early composition "Troops of Doom," which closed out most prior issues of this material by Sepultura, is omitted from the Cavalera disc. In its place is a new track called "Nightmares of Delirium." The new track isn't bad, at least not from a songwriting perspective, and I have no issue with its inclusion, but "Troops of Doom" should have been included as well. My guess is that its inclusion on the Morbid Visions re-recording justified its removal here. And as a final observation, the printing on the actual disc label has less of a major label look and feel than what we've traditionally seen on commercial CDs. It more closely resembles what I've seen on many self-funded releases put out by small local bands. The disc itself is actually pressed ("replicated"), however, and not burned ("duplicated"). This is not a criticism, only an observation, and it does not factor in to my review of this album. It's just something I noticed.