Onisciente Coletivo

AMG Review of Onisciente Coletivo

Adam Bregman
All Music Guide

This speedcore band, Ratos de Porăo, from Săo Paulo, Brazil plays blazing, fast music with death metal-type vocals and leftist, apocalyptic lyrics. On some past releases, they've done a good job at switching up this formula and coming up with some songs that don't fit that mold. But on Onisciente Coletivo they rarely do that. The songs meld into one another, like one very long hardcore song. The different themes range from a song called "Necrochorume," about a neighborhood in Săo Paulo where cadavers from an old graveyard have polluted the water supply, to songs about American imperialism like "Próximo Alvo," to a song about a Nazi computer program invented by IBM that recognized and segregated Jews from non-Jews called "Cybergenocidio." Some of the themes are interesting, but generally the English translation of the lyrics, and the accompanying short texts, don't shed much light on the subject matter. There's plenty of "The system has swallowed me" and "Which will be the next target in Amerikkka?"-type lyrics, which appear not to have been written with much thought. Overall, a ho-hum effort.