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Cattle Decapitation > Monolith of Inhumanity > Reviews > Zodijackyl
Cattle Decapitation - Monolith of Inhumanity

Cutting the head off a beast - 25%

Zodijackyl, April 10th, 2013

Every once in a while I’ll come across pictures of cattle decapitation posted by animal rights activists, captioned with some commentary about eating steak or wearing leather, as a grotesque means to illustrate their point. Most people consider that excessive and tasteless, even gross, something that few revel in and most choose to ignore. The band is appropriately named, as popular fodder among extremists that is habitually ignored by others.

Think of Cattle Decapitation as a cow, and each section as a steak. The music is divided into many thin cuts of riffing, very brief blasts of drumming and short riffs that rarely last more than ten seconds. Delicious steaks? Not quite. More like thin sandwich steaks that need to be seasoned and cooked properly, lest they turn out tough and rubbery. They have been chopped up and cross-cut to make the tough meat more palatable, but they’re overcooked until they have the same texture as a regulation hockey puck. They took something that once had great potential, butchered it into small pieces, then overcooked it as much as they possibly could.

The most severe butchering on this album is the slurry of guitar work. There are countless brief, disjointed bursts of guitar playing, a mix of tremolo picking and power chords, but they never find a real groove because they’re too quick to jump to another riff or egregious blasting section. The bass does the same thing too, opting for random, disjointed licks when it stands out. I suppose one could say the riffs don't have enough meat on the bone. This band can’t take a cue from a band like Suffocation and write riffs that are what riffs need to be - memorable. The bursts are too short and disjointed, they rarely last long enough to grab you and hit hard. There seems to be little consideration with each piece as to it’s placement - whether it comes before or after another and how that frames it. An example of this style done well is Suffocation’s “Liege of Inveracity”, a song so well done that nearly an entire subgenre is built off of imitating it. There’s a really simple, groovy breakdown riff that you’ll never forget once you hear it, the riff before it stands well on its own but frames it perfectly, and the song breaks right back into it’s business after it’s brutal savagery is complete in due time. Cattle Decapitation do none of this, rather they put together as many licks as they can in short succession, lessening the potential impact of each and blurring all of them together into an amateur collage of ideas.

One of the more tasteless offenses against riffing is the random use of sweep picking as a riff. The same five string arpeggio patterns that every guitarist uses are not a riff, they shouldn’t be used as a riff, and they’re really stale. They can be used well, but it’s a cherry on top, not eating a whole jar of maraschino cherries. Sure, most people will eat an entire jar of them in one sitting once or twice, just like every once in a while you just want to hear some ridiculous guitar wankery or dumb it down by hearing an album full of breakdowns, but 99% of the time, the classic cherry on top of an ice cream sundae is the tastiest way to have it. If it sounds good, it sounds good, and even one that’s not assembled that well can satisfy the craving. Sweep picking and single-note chugging are things that are no good on their own, rather they need to be placed tactfully in the composition. This is more like a Mexican omelette with frozen meatballs and stir-fry vegetables thrown into the mix because they all sound good at one time or another.

The drumming is the most painfully synthetic element of this album. Constant blast beats and double bass are necessary components of extreme music, but they serve mainly to highlight how much a disjointed mess the compositions on this album are. While heavy use of triggered drum samples is a producer’s friend and can help achieve a cleaner sound in some cases, when the drummer’s approach is sheer speed, it sounds obnoxious and unnatural. It’s the same kick and snare drum samples, played a hundred times per minute each, whacking back and forth without variation. While I’m sure the goal was to make an unnaturally perfect, crystal-clear sound, that’s a really poor fit for this type of music, and mechanical blasting at high speeds is the most soulless lullaby of modern death metal that can’t have any death because it’s mechanical rather than human. Sure, a human drummer hits the drums and the triggers register all of those hits, it’s edited, and it sounds mechanical. Even a drum machine in death metal can sound alright, as old school Swe-deathers Comecon did, but it will only be acceptable if it’s not overused to make a mechanical drum sound an attraction. It just sounds like an electronic mess here - their blast beats sound more like a dumb gimmick like bass drops than a drummer hammering away hard and fast at a drum kit.

The vocals are another disappointment. They’re fairly consistent and controlled, but their consistency is also complacency. These growls are not at all emotive, they’re not captivating, they’re just monotonous vocals polished in a certain style. Technical terminology aside, vocalists like Frank Mullen sound guttural, adding a sick, deathly feeling to the music. David Vincent sounds evil and commanding, like an ethereal nightmare or the dark lord’s right hand man himself. Martin van Drunen sounds tortured, doomy, even horrifying. Travis Ryan’s vocals don’t have the extra dimension of personality, they don’t spew forth the essence of the music or drive the feeling of the music. There isn’t even much of a feeling to the music, it’s plastic, polished, and emotionless. Hammering, mechanical, and percussive, but those are only attributes of death metal, not the essence. The essence of death metal is nowhere to be found on this album.

This album is a disjointed collage of fast drum beats and unprepared guitar pieces that are thrown together into a forgettable blur. It’s not prepared well, it’s not seasoned right, and the plastic production and drum sounds are overcooked to an unpleasant extreme. This album left a bad taste in my mouth.