This album is shit. It is fucking garbage; literally the sound of having your dick stuck in an old Coke bottle and breaking it open with a hammer and then masturbating with your own blood. It sounds like shit like most of Cattle Decapitation’s other works, but this is refined shit. This is shit you feed to the person at the front of a mile-long human centipede and I fucking love it.
TAE clocks in at about 45 minutes long, which makes its 12 track onslaught about 4 minutes per song on average. Cattle Decapitation keeps very close to the apocalyptic theme of 2012’s “Monolith of Inhumanity”. Where Monolith dealt with the themes of humanity’s unavoidable end if continuing the lifestyle we’ve come to know, 2015 brings the lens to focus on how our environment is affected based on that lifestyle. Maybe dubbed Hippie Grind by some, the album covers relevant and important topics that affect us as people.
The album kicks off in a similar way to Monolith as well with low ambiance slowly giving way to marching drum and guitar before collapsing into the pile of grinding death we know. I’m urged to call this album a Chapter 2 in the prophecy Cattle Decapitation put before us in 2012.
Track 2 begins with tremolo picked guitar and high pitched howls that would fit in any black metal album just as well which leads me to another point of this album. Travis Ryan is fucking insane. The things he can do with his throat and voice are purely disgusting. I remember back when Monolith was first released, one of the things that made me decide I was gonna drop money for it were Ryan’s signature “Cleans”, a brand new technique the band implemented in their song writing for the album. Predictably, they were the selling point for Monolith. Every song had a chorus that Ryan returned to and showed off his new skill.
In “The Anthropocene Extinction”, Ryan’s songwriting process seems to have evolved from that experience and taken a direction away from traditional chorus-filled songs and moved more toward traditional death metal style writing that moves forward sporadically and rarely returns to an established chorus or “catchy line”. Instead, the album seems to focus on the catchy rhythms of the mechanical instruments and their ever-increasing speeds. Just when it seems as if a song is going to go off the rails and the studio is going to burst into flame with all the band members inside, they reach a break and everything slows to a slimy crawl where Ryan is still able to capitalize on his vomity cleans. This new song structure is actually more beneficial to the listener, causing a need to pay closer attention to all parts of a song rather than bobbing your head until the catchy part comes along.
My favorite track, by far, is “Mammals In Babylon”. The interlude that comes before it is a perfect setup and the entirety of the track manages to be unpredictable but bouncy as fuck. Once again, the gross things Ryan does with his mouth can only be matched by the cheapest disease ridden hooker you can find and I still bet this album costs less than she does. You can pick up “The Anthropocene Extinction” in stores now.
– Dylan Sanders
Links: Facebook // Twitter // Merch // YouTube // Metal Blade Records
