Justin Donnelly at Australia's MediaSearch.com recently caught up with CAVALERA CONSPIRACY / SOULFLY frontman Max Cavalera. The following is an excerpt from the story:

One of the genuinely surprising things about Inflikted is how different it sounds to both Max and Igor’s past as members of both Sepultura and Soulfly. Rather than opt for simple nostalgia, the pair have crafted an album that is clearly modern sounding, without betraying the achievements of the past.

“You know, I think this album is a real departure for us. Inflikted wasn’t really put together in any way that a lot of people expected of us. We didn’t sit around with a couple of our own records going, ‘Let’s reproduce this!’ For me, that’s not the way I do things. No matter what, whether it was with Sepultura, Nailbomb or Soulfly, I always wanted to be at the front of change. I always wanted to go against the grain and introduce people to something new direction wise on every album rather than simply do the same thing time and time again. So when it came to making this album, it was no different to me. Maybe when people hear this for the first time, they might miss some of those changes. But if you listen to this album a few times, I believe it’s something that will catch your ear because it’s something that you probably haven’t heard before. You’ll find Inflikted follows the same tradition of Igor and I in regards to doing something completely new sounding. It’s got that sound that says we were simply going by our gut feeling the whole time. The albums we have made together in the past always had that same fire, but they took different directions sound wise.”

Although having immersed himself in his Soulfly project for the better part of ten years (In that time producing five albums), Max assures me that there was no change of mindset prior to preparing for the writing sessions for Cavalera Conspiracy’s debut.

“Although I have made a lot of albums, there has only ever been two where I had a premeditated idea of what I wanted to do. The first album was Roots (1996), which I recorded when I was in Sepultura. That was a conceptual album that actually had a name before anything was written for it. The only other album like that is Soulfly’s Primitive (2000), and only because I had already planned to have so many guest appearances on there. Apart from those two, every album I have made has been completely unplanned. I have the first scratches of songs in my mind, along with some vocals and some song titles. But it’s always through that studio process that we end up shaping the album. It’s really the only way I do all of my albums. A lot of my albums really turned out different to how I initially thought they were going to be. Take for instance Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. (1993). That was originally going to be called Propaganda, and it was thematically going to be all about politics. That changed a lot in the recording process to eventually become what it did, which was talking about the chaos in the world as a whole. Things will always change in the studio, and even more so with Igor with me. We really didn’t have any big plans behind the album. We just played what we thought was right. And as long as with thought the music was okay, it was on the album. It’s the way we have always recorded our albums, and once again it was the same as this album.”

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