Cattle Decapitation
Terrasite
***and1/2 out of *****
On a day RtBE looks back at album art from this year, we also review an album with some of the creepiest art we have seen in some time. Yet Cattle Decapitation's album art for Terrasite fits, the title and the theme of the album perfectly as the San Diego, CA based extreme metal band proposes the theory that human kind is a plague on planet earth.
The eighth studio album from the group finds the band (Travis Ryan – vocals Josh Elmore – guitars Dave McGraw – drums Belisario Dimuzio – guitars Olivier Pinard – bass, with added keys/synths from Tony Parker and Dis Pater) pummeling away with ferocity and power. The metal band is constantly evolving and adding to their sound, on this effort the drums are dominant, guitars both slice and float while Ryans vocals take over when he grabs the mic.
Terrasite never drops in intensity as the deathcore rages out over the ten tracks. The opening "Terrasitic Adaptation" is a monster of theatrical death metal containing slamming drums, keys/synths, rock solid guitars, blazing solos and screeching vocals; a little bit of everything. The lead single "We Eat Our Young" says it all from the band this go around as intense blasting beats and vocals which switch from clean to distorted around lines like, "We’ve upped the ante as the most invasive species of life that ever shat on this earth", enough said.
While Ryan can growl with the best of them, he wants his lyrics to be heard and that constant theme of man being a vile creature is everywhere. The band also plays with small sections of very palpable theatrical metal throughout. Efforts like the chugging, more groove based "Scourge of the Offspring" is a arena ready thrasher that injects soaring vocals while both "...And the World Will Go on Without You" and "The Insignificants" are heavy as hell but also has huge, almost beautiful breaks in the middle of the tracks that add new dimensions to the bands sound.
These small touches are welcomed twists in the sound as the band rarely lets up their sonic assaults and that can be a bit much as a full listen with songs running long and the same theme getting hammered home repeatedly. Tracks like the overloaded "Dead End Residents" and the stop/start pummeling of "The Storm Upstairs" never relent.
That is the point of Terrasite though as Cattle Decapitation are sick of humanity and want you to be as well. The album ends with the most theatrical effort yet, the ten plus minutes of "Just Another Body" that is pastural with it's opening, then grows ominous before embarking on an ebbing/flowing metal journey with keys and synths sprinkled in, wrapping up a very powerful and successful extreme metal album.
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