Posted on: June 13, 2009 Posted by: anfnewsacct Comments: 0

So is Cattle Decapitation trying to go for the play on “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday”? The way that they create metal, I’d have to think the former is true. The style is a plain, unadorned metal that is just fast. Supersonic guitars tie up with intricate drums and a shouted out, early Seputltura-esque set of vocals to mark the bands foray with “Unintelligent Design”. The one thing that delineates the band from the rest of the acts on the market has to be the double vocals, which fight each other during the track.

The vocals seem to have their own moments of clarity; the slower, sludgier vocal takes the slower guitar lines, while the more thrash guitars are helped out by the faster and much more spastic second set of vocals. One thing that individuals should understand about “Karma Bloody Karma” is that the disc itself is very cohesive and coherent; Cattle Decapitation is not looking for a few singles and a whole lot of filler with this album. While the quality of the disc is solid throughout, there does not seem to be a breakout single for the band that could catapult them to the fame of a Cannibal Corpse or a Deicide. However, individuals should listen tin to the disc during tracks like “The Carcass Derrick” for interesting experiments with time signatures and a harder edge, which sacrifices speed for brutality.

The album is cohesive, but Cattle Decapitation goes throughout the range of metal styles and uses whatever they can for the twelve tracks on the disc. “Bereavement” is perhaps the most interesting of all of the tracks on “Karma Bloody Karma”. It is during this track that the style that Cattle Decapitation uses quickly switches; while most of the track falls in line with the generic “metal” tag, there are segments where the bands plumb a Southern Lord- type of sludge, and others where the bands prove that they are royalty in the thrash genre. Forty minutes is a decent runtime for a disc that is this furious. There is surprisingly a lot of material to digest during this disc, so individuals might want to give this a cursory listen before throwing themselves headlong into the metal that is uniquely Cattle Decapitation’s. The one thing that individuals should know about Cattle Decapitation is that they will always come ready to turn over individual conceptions about metal and what is possible for a three or four minute track. Top Tracks: Suspended in Coprolite, Total Gore?

Rating: 6.8/10

Cattle Decapitation – Karma Bloody Karma / 2006 Metal Blade / 12 Tracks / http://www.cattledecapitation.com / Reviewed 18 August 2006

[JMcQ]

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