Album Review : Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas (2019)
Being a metal band is difficult. It takes equal parts technical acumen, creative vision and marketing savvy to make it and even if you have it all, success is not guaranteed. Being a consistently successful metal band is even MORE difficult. Audiences who fall in love with your first album don’t want you to change at all. Any variation from the original formula will be interpreted like treason. In many ways, Cattle Decapitation’s latest album Death Atlas was doomed to fail. But it’s pretty fucking good.
Cattle Decapitation is known to be a deathgrind band and there’s definitely some of their core sound on Death Atlas, but it’s a rather drastic departure in style. This album is very much influenced by Anaal Nathrakh’s latest records, which is perhaps why I enjoyed it so much. Death Atlas offers a very black metal-drench blend on their trademark brutality, which you can hear right away on the song The Geocide. It’s one of the most straighforward and brutal songs on the record. Walls of guitar, blast beats, this is fucking war.
But The Geocide is one of the only self-explanatory songs on Death Atlas. The rest is very lengthy and atmospheric in its own pulverizing way. There’s even ambient interludes, which a lot of listeners didn’t have any patience for. It requires a lot of patience. The most notorious song on this album is probably the ominous Bring Back The Plague, which is exactly what the planet did four months after the album was released. Travis Ryan’s falsetto creeped me out in the most delightful way.
Halfway through, the song pries open and Ryan hits this deathlike falsetto where he implores to plague to kill to insure our own survival. There’s a lot of moments like these on Death Atlas, where the musical, creative and political aspects of Cattle Decapitation become one, but this is the strongest. It stops being deathgrind, black metal or whatever and becomes a thing of its own. Another one is on With All Disrespect where Ryan shrills: Can you hear the end coming? over and over again.
I’m conscious a lot of Death Atlas rests on Travis Ryan’s masterful performance, but it’s build this way. On With All Disrespect, David McGraw’s masterful performance enhances the authority of Ryan’s call. On the title song (which is wonderful by the way) Josh Elmore’s guitar leads open up in these lengthy, almost ethereal chords that all the breathing room for Ryan’s commanding falsetto. Death Atlas is all about these moments, where songs become more than songs. They breathe with operatic despair.
Can you like Cattle Decapitation if you’re not an environmental activist or a tech death geek? I’d say yes. Over the years, they’ve evolved from being "the vegan band" to being "that end-of-the-world" band. If anything, their crushing, dramatic approach makes a great argument for being environmentally conscious. It has always been what made them stand out from the pack, artistically. The band got a lot of flack for not being musically creative on here, but I think audiences are just listening to the wrong things.
There’s a lot more great songs on Death Atlas if you’re willing to accept it’s not a conventional deathgrind record. One Day Closer to the End of the World is one of my favourites. It’s dripping with cynicism and defeat. The Great Dying 1 & 2 are also instant classics. So is Time’s Cruel Curtain where local folk hero Olivier Pinard shines on bass. Rhythm guitar’s Belisario Dimuzio really gets loose with the chugging riffs on there too, creating one of the most unique sonic tapestries on the record.
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Death Atlas is a misunderstood record. It’s being underappreciated because of what it isn’t, rather than appreciated for what it is. It’s an operatic doomsday prediction that is very much in league with Anaal Nathrakh’s work without being copycat material. In fact, I would love them to tour together. I would love for Cattle Decapitation to pursue in this more expansive artistic direction and crazy, new art like Death Atlas on their next record. I really don’t understand the negative hype on this one.
