LP Review: I by PEDRA PRETA

Something dark, heavy, and brutal has emerged from the depths of South America in the form of Brazil’s PEDRA PRETA, and their debut record, I, with enough venom and stoner hooks to grind you to your core.

The four-piece have melded together every form of heavy music you love into one confined, suffocating space, where you can experience every head banging emotion you can muster. The riffs switch between drawn out doom and fist-pumping stoner, while the vocals have a hint of bi-polar disorder, jumping between death-like screams to laid back psychedelia. It makes for an edge of your seat listen.

Opening track ‘O Ritual’ starts off as a tribute to Sleep with its repetitive killer riff leading you into a full blown stoner death assault (or as the band call it, “funeral rock’n’roll”) as Mickael Rabello’s vocals are screeched from the depths of hell. ‘Sgurd’ displays some excellent sludge heaviness before ‘Evil Spell’ displays the bands cleaner cut stoner side with softer vocals, but the riffs remain just as dominant throughout.  

When closing track ‘Devils Way’ sucks you into its stoner delicacy, you realise that the record works better with its polar opposite vocal approaches than it would without, as it sets the band apart from the rest of their peers, but also it makes for a much more interesting listen, as when the riffs can’t get any heavier, you have to turn the vocals up to their raw, punishing best, to which PEDRA PRETA do with immense satisfaction. 

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