Wiki
-
Release Date
25 March 1991
-
Length
9 tracks
Arise is the fourth studio album by Brazilian thrash metal band Sepultura, released in 1991 through Roadrunner Records. Upon its release, the album received top reviews from heavy metal magazines such as Rock Hard, Kerrang! and Metal Forces. Arise is considered Sepultura's finest hour among longtime fans.
While the music on Arise was mostly in the same death/thrash style as their previous album, Beneath the Remains, it was clear that the Sepultura sound was acquiring an experimental edge. The album presented their first incursions with industrial music, hardcore punk and latin percussion.
The tour (1990-1992) that supports the album has been the group's longest yet, totalling 220 shows in 39 different countries. During this trek, the album went gold in Indonesia, making it their very first music industry certification. By the tour's end, Arise had achieved platinum sales worldwide.
Arise garnered praise from a wide variety of sources. By the time of its release, major Brazilian newspapers were already aware of the band's existence, and advanced copies sent to them were generally met with positive reviews. Artur G. Couto Duarte, writing for O Estado de Minas, described Sepultura's soundscapes as "stories describing barren worlds where disease, hunger, torture and death reign supreme". Folha de São Paulo's Sérgio Sá Leitão pointed out Sepultura's increasing compositional skills, drawing attention to how the band's occasional use of restraint benefited their songs as a whole.
The international pop press also took notice of Brazil's premiere metal group. Top British weeklies such as the Melody Maker and NME wrote lengthy articles on the band, praising them. A Melody Maker journalist wrote: "Sepultura is a Brazilian metal band which seems to be in the verge of getting big - maybe even bigger than Slayer, their only true rival." Genre-specific magazines also reacted positively to the group. Germany's Thrash elected Sepultura the best band in the world, defeating major contenders Metallica and Slayer. Sepultura were also prominently featured on the biggest metal publications of the time, such as Kerrang!, Rock Hard and Metal Forces.
Arise was the first Sepultura record to enter the Billboard charts, at number 119. It was also the first to gain a music certification—Arise went gold in 1992 for selling 25,000 copies in Indonesia. By 1993, the album had sold 1 million units around the globe. In 2001, it won a second certification: silver in the United Kingdom, for selling an excess of 60,000 copies.
Throughout the years, Arise was continuously praised by the music press not only as a landmark release of Sepultura's career, but of extreme metal in general. In November 1996, Q magazine thus remarked: "Arise remains their thrash high water mark, sounding like an angry man throwing tools at an urinal while reading the Book of Revelations." Later on, Allmusic contributor Eduardo Rivadavia considered Arise as "a classic of the death metal genre." The album also appeared in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2006), edited by writer Robert Dimery.
Album descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
