Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas

Angry Metal Guy

Coming hot off of two excellent albums in Monolith of Inhumanity and The Anthropocene Extinction, Cattle Decapitation’s Death Atlas is one of the year’s most anticipated extreme metal releases. The band are an institution and an interesting force in extreme metal for both their singular creativity and unflinchingly progressive politics in a genre dominated by derivation and incoherent edgelord lyricism. As I said in my review of The Anthropocene Extinction, Cattle Decapitation are just fucking cool, and if you’re unfamiliar with them I would normally recommend you listen to our primer playlist before you continue reading. But for this album, you might be best served by low expectations.

In line with those expectations, Death Atlas begins with an atmospheric intro track. Similar interludes pop up after every third track for the rest of the album. What I like best about these four interludes is that you can delete them and spare yourself their annoyance. With that task complete, we’re down to 47 minutes of Decapitation, or at least music made by the people in the band Cattle Decapitation and released under that name. But hey, let’s start out with the good news.

Death Atlas by Cattle Decapitation

The good news: Travis Ryan’s vocals are still some of the best in the business. His snarling melodic screams take the lead but now run a wider gamut of timbres. Alongside guttural belches and screams, the mouthy cleans in “Time’s Cruel Curtain” and “Bring Back the Plague” are somewhat familiar, but Ryan throws a real curveball in “Vulturous,” double-tracking quaking baritone singing beneath robotic screams. “Vulturous” also sports the album’s best riff, a cascade of descending couplet glissandos that hearkens back to the band’s glory days. Death Atlas a very singer-centered album and its reliance on Ryan reminds me of Leprous’ The Congregation. Ryan, just like Solberg on The Congregation, does a great job carrying all of the songs, but fans will recall that cuts from past albums stood on the merits of their writing alone.

Which brings us to the bad news: the rest of Death Atlas is bland. Cattle Decapitation push into the territory of melodic black metal in search of a grandiosity, an approach that’s immediately clear on “The Geocide.” Save for a nice trade of solos between Josh Elmore and new recruit Belisario Demuzio, the opener consists almost entirely of steadily blasting drums, steady trem picking, and power chords. You’ll find a lot more of that across the album. Instead of angular intervals and whiplash rhythmic shifts, Death Atlas relies on featureless blasting and simplistic black metal leads a la Anaal Nathrakh. There are moments where the band pull out a nice riff or a decent groove, but they’re fleeting—that killer riff in “Vulturous” is used mostly in passing. “Finish Them” is the one track that feels like a Cattle Decapitation song and not like Cattle Decapitation covering black metal.

Cattle Decapitation aren’t the worst at being a black metal band, which is great because there are no other active black metal bands in the year 2019. I can’t think of a single one. Neither can you. What an innovation for this band to go from writing some of the most obscene riffs and grooves in the business to mostly trem-picking single pitches for four bars. We don’t see enough of that in the metal scene these days, and I’m glad Cattle Decapitation continue to buck trends and forge their own path.

Contra the previous paragraph, I’m not bitter—Death Atlas is not a bad album, but that’s entirely due to Ryan’s performance. Without that, there’s really nothing here to hang on to. The big melodies are fun but between them the songs are uninspired and lack the rhythmic grist to effectively contrast the choruses. The band have jettisoned most of the burly and brutal deathgrind that got them to where they are today in favor of the genre du jour, and it does them no favors. Even without seven and a half minutes of interludes, the album feels bloated and directionless and completely pales in comparison to the band’s best work. Ferrous Beuller pointed out that most of the songs off Monolith of Inhumanity are better than the entirety of Death Atlas and I definitely agree. Call me a gristle licker, but I vastly prefer the chunky, rough cuts of Cattle to this lunchmeat.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 6¹ | Format Reviewed: 268 kbps mp3
Label: Metal Blade Records
Websites: cattledecapitaiton.bandcamp.com | cattledecapitation.com | facebook.com/cattledecapitation
Releases Worldwide: November 29th, 2019

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The Quietus

Despite a volume of reported warnings from ecologists and other learned academics for decades, the rapid degradation of our planet at humanity’s hand has now become a hot topic. However, instead of dealing with such evidently serious issues in a productive, inclusive manner, we have done what we always do: split into factions to push disparate agendas and argue in circles, all the while our billowing emissions increasingly tighten their death-grip on our collective throat and everything suffers.

To be fair, we probably all deserve extinction, since we have chosen money as our god and our selfishness gets in the way of creating a better, more sustainable world. This is pretty much the underlying nihilistic stance death/grind phenoms Cattle Decapitation have been firing off about on socially conscious screeds such as 2004’s Humanure (replete with striking vegetarian friendly artwork of a cow defecating human remains), 2006’s Karma.Bloody.Karma and on a grander scale, the rightfully acclaimed Monolith of Inhumanity (2012) and its follow up, The Anthropocene Extinction (2015).

As we reach boiling point – environmentally and socio-politically – Cattle Decapitation’s conceptual message has never been more timely. "The core concept of this record is humanity's insignificance despite what we've convinced ourselves," explains vocalist Travis Ryan in the press release accompanying the promo. "That's kind of why this album cover takes place in space, to remind you that 'the universe always finds a way to purge’. In the grand scheme of things, our species is merely a fleeting thought."

While you gaze into the void in existential agony while pondering that terminally bleak quote, you could do a lot worse than rip through Death Atlas (a true contender for death metal album of the year) at high volume to try drown out the gnawing silence of our worthlessness. Written primarily by Cattle Decapitation’s core trio of Ryan, Josh Elmore (guitars) and Dave McGraw (drums) – Belisario Dimuzio (guitars) and Cryptopsy’s Olivier Pinard (bass) joined during its creation – the band’s sound has never been as instrumentally refined or as atmospherically vast as it is now, on career-best LP Death Atlas.

Hyperspeed blast-beats and sweeping double-bass runs syncopate with razored tremolos and seismic tech-death riffs as 'The Geocide' erupts in world-shattering fashion following the tense, filmic intro of 'Anthropogenic'. The pacing of the album from thereon out is perfect. Strategically placed mood-pieces reflecting the album’s concept give the listener a needed reprieve from the aural bombardment resulting from technically dazzling, yet hook-laden and structurally unique tracks such as 'Be Still Our Bleeding Hearts', 'Bring Back the Plague' and Morbid Angel-trapped-in-a-blackhole maelstrom of 'With All Disrespect'.

Even those relentless additions to Cattle Decapitation’s canon, however, have subtle layers of keyboard added to the bombast, and coupled with Ryan’s multi-headed vocals – guttural growls, Dani Filth-esque banshee shrieks, the occasional pig-like gurgle, and the much more prominent use of his extra-terrestrial cleans (which sound like alien vocal cords dissolving in a vat of acid) – the dynamism is next-level for death metal. Ryan even manages to convey a profound sense of despair and resignation with those distinctive vocals of his, particularly during the album’s emotionally heightened closing moments ('Time’s Cruel Curtain' and the title track), and his ability to craft outstanding hooks in a band that runs the gauntlet of every extreme metal style you can think of is hugely impressive.

With Death Atlas, not only have Cattle Decapitation managed to equal anything put forward by metal’s best in 2019, they’ve created an album that will stand the test of time, just like the masterworks of their inspirations – Carcass, Napalm Death, Suffocation, Death and beyond. But most interestingly of all, there’s a striking impression that they can top this excellent record in the future. That is of course dependent on whether or not we become immolated by a natural inferno of our making in the meantime...

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