Label - Metal Blade Records
Release Date - 12th May 2023
Words- Tony Bliss
Cattle Decapitation are genuine one-offs. Whilst always a better than average deathgrind band, the release of 2012’s Monolith Of Humanity and follow-up The Anthropocene Extinction saw the California natives reborn as something lightyears beyond their peers, both in dynamic enterprise and monstrous, offal-drenched brutality. With 2019’s visionary Death Atlas, they morphed into true world-beaters, demonstrating their disgust for humanity amid some of the most cinematic and heroically excessive extreme metal tunes you were likely to hear for decades to come - until now that is, as Terrasite is legitimately even better.
Make no mistake, this is still an outrageously fun and seriously brilliant death metal album at its core, yet it’s the band’s compulsion to carve out their own singular, class-of-one niche that - here more than ever - has got them operating in line with the most sonically engrossing extreme metal bands of a generation. And so whilst the likes of recent single ‘We Eat Our Young’ will smash your jaw clean off your face, it's clear that Cattle Decapitation demand more from themselves nowadays than just livid frothing and snorting, with every riff and gravity-blast abundant in atmosphere and drama, and twisting their death metal backbone into absurd new shapes.
Indeed, the fact that the album is underpinned by a wicked cool concept (concerning a race of post-apocalyptic mutants) only adds to the sense that Terrasite feels progressive, in that both aurally and thematically there’s loads going on, yet the band are so clearly pumped with ideas and vitriol there is simply no time to fuck about. And so, ‘The Insignificants’ with its slow descent into a doom-laden nausea, ‘The Storm Upstarts’ and its almost Opeth-like midsection and a woozily melodic ‘...And The World Will Go On Without You’ are mini-epics in the truest sense, each sounding like ten minutes of ideas condensed into half the time and rich in structural and dynamic rabbit holes - fret not though, there’s always a landslide of swivel-eyed blasting and guttural grotesquery around the corner, and Travis Ryan’s pseudo ‘clean vocals’ remain a focal point whenever they come shrieking through the noise.
It’s on closer ‘Just Another Body’ where the band really spread their noxious wings however, a shape-shifting colossus which moves between bursts of demented speed, hissing, gelatinous horror, brooding melody and a spiralling, almost orchestral final few minutes that is all so monumental and epic, we begin to wonder where these five dudes can go from here. It also encapsulates why Cattle Decapitation are still the most stupidly exciting band on the planet, and it’s of little surprise that they’ve somehow managed to top themselves yet again. Terrasite is another extraordinary record.
9.5/10
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