On 12 May 2023, Metal Blade Records put out fifty two minutes and forty one seconds of new Cattle Decapitation, and ten minutes and fifteen seconds of that total is one song, sitting at the end, waiting. That ratio is the whole record. Nine tracks about the planet getting its own back, and then a tenth that has nothing to do with concepts at all.
The San Diego five who have been telling the species exactly what it is since 1996, and who have never once been talked out of it, came back on Metal Blade three and a half years after Death Atlas landed on 29 November 2019, with ten songs produced, mixed and mastered by Dave Otero and a concept that finally gives the accusation a body to walk around in. The body has six legs.
Terrasite is Terra plus parasite, the earth-eater, and the thing on the sleeve is what is left of the species once the planet has been stripped to the bone: a cockroach carrying human memory around inside it, climbing out of its egg case to carry on eating. Travis Ryan put the thesis to New Noise Magazine on 12 May 2023 with no decoration on it whatsoever: "[H]umans are fucking parasites and cockroaches." Twenty seven years of lyrics, and that is the summary.
Ten songs and the engine inside them
The record does not warm up. "Terrasitic Adaptation" opens on Ryan crooning, which is the most unsettling sound he owns, and has David McGraw's double kick going flat out and concussive before the first minute is done with.
Then "We Eat Our Young" does the dirty work. Three minutes and fifty five seconds, the shortest song on the album, no way in and no way out, the argument delivered at a sprint before anybody has finished sitting down. It gives no quarter and it does not want any.
"Scourge of the Offspring" is where the method shows itself. Josh Elmore and Belisario Dimuzio run a technical death metal riff at full tilt, Ryan barks over the top of it like a man reading an eviction notice through a letterbox, and then the whole thing opens out into a chorus that is close to sorrowful and entirely sincere. Fast, then melodic, then the big one. That sequence is the engine, and it comes round again.
Picture the quarry a few years after everybody went home. The pit has filled up, the water has gone the green of a fish tank nobody has cleaned since Easter, and the whole site is now under the management of things with too many legs. There is a beetle in the portacabin, sitting in the good chair. Under the floor of it there is a committee of something with firm opinions about the future of the place, and the opinions are carrying, because the new tenants breed in a puddle, eat the paperwork, live happily on dust and will outlast every contract ever signed over that ground, and nothing anybody can build is going to get them out. That is where this album is set. Otero recorded it in broad daylight rather than in the dark, which is the single best decision on the record. Death Atlas was the night. This is noon.
The crooning is not a gimmick, and "...and the World Will Go On Without You" is the proof. Ryan holds back almost the whole way through it and the song is the more frightening for it. A voice built out of snarl, guttural growl and a goblin register was always one bad decision away from being a novelty act. Restraint is what has kept it out of that, and this is the album where the restraint arrived.
"A Photic Doom" hands the record to its guitar players. Richness and swagger, in a genre that normally treats both as decoration, Elmore and Dimuzio trading lines as though the song were the last structure still standing above the water. This is where the melodic death metal in the band's bloodline stops being an influence and becomes the point.
"Dead End Residents" is the concept with a street address on it. A species that has eaten its way to the bottom of the road and has nowhere left to move to, named in three words, sitting at track eight, which on a fifty two minute death metal album is traditionally where the thing starts checking its watch. This one does not.
The one charge that sticks
Here is the case against, and it is a real one. The album has a shape it likes and it keeps going back to it: blast, melody, chorus or breakdown, next song. By the second run through, the next turn announces itself before it arrives, which is not something a death metal record should ever let happen. There is a second version of the same complaint that says fifty two minutes is ten too many. That one falls over. Nothing here is padding, and pulling a track out would not improve what is left, it would only shorten it. The predictability is real. The bloat is not.
A method can stop surprising anybody and still leave the room flattened.
"Just Another Body" closes the album and runs ten minutes and fifteen seconds. Gabe Serbian, who co-founded the band and played on its earliest records before leaving in 2001, died on 30 April 2022, days before the sessions for this album began. The song was written for him. Travis Ryan has said it also carries the death of Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder that same year. It is led by piano rather than by guitar, it takes all the time it needs, and it is the one place on the album where the concept is set down and the subject is addressed directly. The record is dedicated to Serbian's memory.
It's hard to even listen to the song. I wasn't sure how I was going to even lay down the vocals to it.
Travis Ryan, New Noise Magazine, 12 May 2023
Twenty seven years in, and the thing that has changed is not the anger. It is the control. The formula charge is fair and it is what keeps this off the very top shelf, and it has nothing to say about the other fifty minutes and less than nothing to say about the last ten. Play it in order. Do not treat the closer as an epilogue, because it is the reason everything in front of it stands up.