Goregrinding Rollercoaster Ride

Oh. My. Decapitated. Head.
I just got the new Cattle Decapitation record and I am positively speechless. Is it in the running for my favorite album of the year so far you ask? Unarguably yes.

This album will probably be derided in a lot of circles for precisely the reasons that I love it. Cattle Decapitation used to be more grind than death, an equation that seems to have been resoundingly flipped with this album. The songs are longer ("The Gardener's of Eden" tops five minutes) and they've injected a little bit of (shock! horror!) melody into these songs. Some might call this selling out, I call it developing. "The Gardener's of Eden" is perhaps the best example of this development. This song is still pretty brutal, but at the same time it is a dynamic ride of a song. The best analogy I can think of for this is a rollercoaster. Most of the time you are being whipped around and flipped upside down, but every once in awhile you get a bit of a breather while you're being pulled uphill. A breather which we all know ultimately makes the coming onslaught even more intense.

There is not a single bad song on this album (except for maybe "The Harvest Floor" which is less a bad song and more a breather that lasts too long) and there are some really truly great songs. Like I mentioned before "The Gardener's of Eden" is like a precis of the entire record, it really does a great job of distilling everything that makes this album great in one song. Then, there is of course "Regret and the Grave" the epic and headcrushing closer.

What's more, all of this awesomeness is crammed into an easy to take package. Clocking in at under 40 minutes, the album doesn't stick around long enough to get stale or entirely wear out the listener, but it's long enough to satisfy every gorey and grindy desire you might have.

The only complaint I do have is a minimal one. It seems like in moving from their grindcore roots CD might be heading in the direction of virtuosic noodling for virtuosic noodling's sake. While this isn't a major turn off in the context of this particular record because it doesn't really overtake any of the songs, it's more of a shadow of things that may be to come. What's more, this virtuosic noodling isn't even a necessarily a bad thing, it just isn't my cup of tea.

A final note, I included the album art for this record in the post because I think it is entirely awesome in it's ability to completely encapsulate the band's central message. (It of course gets nowhere near topping the artwork for "Humanure" which was a revelation in it's glorious disgustingness, incidentally, that link is not for the faint of heart).