Album Review: CATTLE DECAPITATION Death Atlas (11/29)

Cattle Decapitation is an extreme metal band from San Diego, California, formed in 1996. The line-up has suffered a few changes but Travis Ryan – vocals and Josh Elmore – guitars have been the driving forces and drummer Dave McGraw has already been with the band for 12 years. The bass has been less stable. In 2019 the band officially added a second guitar on the hands of  Belisario Dimuzio. Interesting fact, while the band started with an entirely vegetarian lineup, only two current members are vegetarian, namely Travis Ryan and Josh Elmore. No surprise that the band's lyrics are largely concerned with human impact on the environment, the ethics of eating meat and animal rights. Musically they started as really focused Grindcore but more recently Progressive Death Metal influences have become very prominent.

Death Atlas is the eighth studio album and comes more than four years after their masterpiece 2015's The Anthropocene Extinction. At just under 55 minutes, it is their longest album to date. 14 tracks (4 being intros/interludes) including the 9 min final title track. Vocalist Travis Ryan comments: "Musically and lyrically, there is a lot of grief, anger, hate, passion, and emotion poured into this one". I do like how they structured the album in basically 4 almost equal parts. Each one with an intro song full of samples of news reports. It's really difficult to define the metal sub-genre, we may as well just call it extreme prog metal. There's a little bit of everything: Melodic and Symphonic Black Metal, Tech Death, Deathcore, Death-doom, Thrash and even a hint of traditional heavy metal such as Accept.

Travis vocal is one of the most versatile in extreme metal today. From high pitched black metal screams to deep death metal growls and everything in between. The guitar work is focused on fast guitar picking and short but powerful solos. But you can also find some death metal riffs here and there. The drumming combines super fast blast beats and moments of more groove. The album is very dynamic with unconventional song structures.

I have not much to complain and there are only a couple of tracks that failed to catch my attention. And I must mention The title track being this "grand finale" of this bleak and dark album. It's a 9m15s epic closer.  I'd also highlight that I'm usually not a fan of intro tracks, but in Death Atlas they work well. Those 4 instrumentals break the brutality and give us a minute to breath. They also create those 4 parts which makes the album more digestible.

Death Atlas is a statement delivered via the metal music channel. It's an eclectic piece of extreme metal bringing influences from different sub-genres of Death/Black Metal and Grindcore. It's powerful, it's bleak and masterfully delivered.

SCORE: 82/100
Genre: Progressive Death Metal / Grindcore
Released by Metal Blade Records on November 29th, 2019

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Rating System
98 - 100 Perfect
92 - 97 Excellent
86 - 91 Great
81 - 85 Very Good
77 - 80 Good
69 - 76 Mixed
58 - 68 Bad