Roots (Sepultura Album) - Reception

Reception

Roots received worldwide critical acclaim. The mainstream press appreciated the album's unusual rhythms. American newspapers like The New Times, the Daily News and the Los Angeles Times reviewed the Brazilian band: "The mixture of the dense metal of Sepultura and the Brazilian music has a intoxicating effect", wrote a Los Angeles Times reviewer. The Daily News praised the album saying: "Sepultura reinvented the wheel. By mixing metal with native instruments, the band resuscitates the tired genre, reminding of Led Zeppelin times. But while Zeppelin mixed English metal with African beats, it's still more moving to hear a band that uses elements of its own country. By extracting the sounds of the past, Sepultura determines the future direction of metal".

Specialized heavy metal critics also reviewed the album positively. Martin Popoff, author of the book The Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal, ranked Roots as the 11th best metal record of all time. "This is a spectacular metal and futurist hardcore LP", wrote Popoff, "a masterpiece, accomplished by a band with an enormous heart and an even larger intellect". Kerrang! magazine awarded Roots second place in the list of "100 records that you have to hear before dying"; just after In Utero from Nirvana. In 2001 Q magazine named Roots as one of the 50 Heaviest Albums Of All Time. Rolling Stone Brasil named it the 57th best Brazilian music album. Rolling Stone (3/21/96, p. 98) gave the album three stars out of five and said, "Sepultura play a violent game of sonic overload... the band uses its catharsis as a creative force, funneling torrents of noise into a tunnel of hate." Music critic Piero Scaruffi includes Roots at number nine, just after Dream Theater's Images and Words and before Electric Wizard's Come My Fanatics..., in his classification of the best metal albums of all time. Music critic Robert Christgau gave the album a negative review. He qualified the album with a "dud" rating.