The Batlord

Well that's what I basically meant: take advice from members about which albums would be more interesting or important to cover. I wouldn't try to troll you with it, but there are some important albums from genres that you should be introduced to if you're going to be doing this thread.

I very well might. Maybe check out some of the **** I haven't heard before, or go into more detail on albums I put up that if I feel deserve more than just a blurb.

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Trollheart

Okay, well I'm prepared to try that. For now, I'll go in order but if anyone wants me to take an album out of sequence just post here and let me know. I'll post in the thread itself too, in case there are people there not reading this journal yet.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

The Batlord

Suggesting 89. Exodus - Bonded by Blood . Don't know that it's your cup of tea, but it's required listening as far as thrash goes.

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Trollheart

At the special request of Frownland I have pushed this album up in the queue, but I must be honest, when I saw their subgenre described as “Deathgrind” my heart sank. I know there will be albums, many of them, in this list we're compiling that will not appeal to me, that I know little to nothing of, but I am determined to try to treat each one the same as any I'm very familiar with, such as the aforementioned Iron Maiden one. However, this does present something of a problem, and this is why initially I had hoped Batty would co-host this with me, as he knows more about these guys I'm sure than I do about Marillion. My information all has to come secondhand, as I have heard of them vaguely, but know absolutely nothing about them.

Overview (such as it is)

What I do know is that this was their sixth album, they're American and some of the band are vegetarians. Not much, huh? Well, in addition to this, and not about this album specifically but about Cattle Decapitation, I can tell you that they have, not surprisingly, courted controversy not only for their views on animal rights, but for their determination not to dilute their message and to put it across in the starkest, most visceral terms possible, one of these ways being via their album covers.

German record label SPM refused to handle their second album, To Serve Man, due to its graphic cover (below) and record outlets censored the cover of their third one, Humanure, even refusing to display the album. They probably should have expected this, and in truth in a digital age who really cares what record shops do, as you can get anything online, and this surely only helped to drive sales of the albums through such publicity. It's like Zaphod Beeblebrox said in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “If they don't want us to have it that bad, then I want to have it even more!” Or to put it another way, the sweetest fruit is always that which you're told you can't have, as Adam and Eve found out to their cost. Never thought I'd be mentioning the Bible in an article on Cattle Decapitation, now did you? Well, it all helps to fill up space as I desperately try to make sure there's something to read in this article.

Artwork

Whatever I may think of their music (and spoiler: I'm sure I'm going to hate it, be bewildered by it and be unable to write much about it) the guys have certainly gone into some detail in their album sleeves over the years. Often I find this is a common trait with some of the more extreme bands, as if either they want to entice the buyer or fan in with a really shocking album cover, or (and this is probably unlikely but you never know) their inner artist comes out when they're thinking of album design. Be that as it may, the basic concept of the cover of this album is by Travis Ryan, bandleader, founder and vocalist for the band, and the actual artwork seems to have been created by one Wes Benscoter. It's an interesting if somewhat repellant scene, showing what I take to be based on the apes portrayed in the movie version of the Arthur C. Clarke novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, a true classic of science-fiction cinema.

In the foreground we see a man-creature but we'll get back to him. Further back, dancing around a huge dark obelisk we see those apes, and if we look closely at them they're not all apes. The two on the extreme left of the cover are in fact sort of proto-human; one certainly has a skull on a skinny neck as opposed to the bullish shoulders of the others, and one (though turned away from us) looks to have hair on his head, almost none on his back and be a little more developed. He also looks to be wearing the remnants of trousers. Blood is dripping down the stone monolith, though there's no indication as to where this has come from.

The inspiration for the album cover? A scene from the opening minutes of Stanley Kubrick's production of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Now let's look at the figure in the foreground. Well, he's human. Isn't he? Well yes, but what I originally took to be his eating strips of flesh and tearing them with his teeth I now see to be his own flesh, which he is peeling away from his face, rather like a mask, to reveal the ape beneath. This is very clever and really must be remarked upon. I assume what CD are saying here is that underneath us all is that beast, striving to get out, and that far from being an enlightened, evolved being, man is just waiting to slip back down the evolutionary path and revert to the state from which he came. Perhaps he is already doing so. This speaks to CD's revulsion against eating meat, the treatment humans mete out to animals, and their whole stance against man being the dominant lifeform on the Earth.

Or maybe it's just a cool cover they thought of when they were stoned, who knows? But I prefer to think that Ryan worked long and hard on the concept for this, got the artist he knew could realise his vision and through him produced this nightmarish vision of the beast that lurks within us all, fighting to get out.

Band lineup:
With the departure due to “musical and personal differences” of longtime bassist Troy Oftedal, who had been with them since 1998, this is the first outing for new man Derek Engemann, but otherwise this is the same band that recorded 2009's The Harvest Floor.
Travis Ryan (Vocals, Electronics, Atmospherics)
Josh Elmore (Guitar)
Derek Engemann (Bass)
Dave McGraw (Drums)

(I have no idea who is who, though they don't seem a very happy bunch, do they?)
Songwriting

From what I read, Ryan writes all the lyrics (the band seems to be his baby really, considering all the extra stuff he does) and the music is credited to the band as a whole. Again, from what I can see, and just looking at the titles having never heard the songs, they all seem to centre on the grotesqueness of man's treatment of animals, with the likes of “Gristle licker”, “A living, breathing piece of defecating meat” and “Lifestalker”. I am going to run up the lyrics and will let you know (assuming I can't make head or tail of the music as I am expecting will be the case) what the songs seem to be about.


A cow, the source of all your Big Macs and double cheeseburgers

Place in Metal History

Honestly, I don't know. I'm sure CD are at the more extreme edge of even extreme metal (when you have the words “death” and “grind” in the same description that probably precludes any string orchestras or tender ballads!) and they seem to have been praised for their honest and committed stance to their cause, but in terms of how they stand in the pantheon of metal gods, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps Batty, Frownland, or even you, if you're reading and can contribute, can shed some light on that.

As for the album, well buckle up because I have a very definite feeling it's gonna be a bumpy ride, not to mention one short on description from me!

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Trollheart

The Album in Depth

Well it starts off encouragingly enough, with a big dark keyboard and then punching guitar but quite slower than I had expected. It speeds up then of course, with the vocal unsurprisingly being barely discernible as words, and if Travis Ryan wanted to sound like the animals whose cause he champions then he couldn't have made a better attempt. I'll never make out any lyrics so I've got the sheet here, and to be honest they're pretty damn well thought out. Lines like ”Pale horse on the horizons/ The blood of billions staining the scythe” give an nice apocalyptic view of things, while ”Predators of the self” is I feel a very clever line. Even those who stand by and don't get involved fail to escape, as he bellows ”Damn the embracers of neutrality/ Fellow future fossils!”

This, then, is “The carbon stampede”, and while it hurtles along it's certainly not as chaotic as some grindcore I've heard. There are moments where it almost slows down to a sort of march, and there's definite melody of a sort in there. The whole thing smoulders with rage and accusation, with the Four Horsemen making an appearance at the end, as things turn a little slower and almost kind of anthemic. Blasting back to full power with “Dead set on suicide”, where Ryan sneers ”Turning the other cheek never worked in the wild/ You'd be a meal in seconds!” and goes on to rag on the tired old target of Christianity --- ”Now see this Jesus Christ/ A thorn in the side of right” eventually making the connection ”Jesus Christ is suicide!” Ah, poor old J-man! He gets such a tough ride from heavy metal, doesn't he? It's an interesting fact that, though I could not make out any words Ryan was singing, when I looked at the lyrics and then listened, I could; I could hear him singing the words. So it's a case not of being able to work out what he's singing but of knowing what he's singing and then straining to hear the words, which does work, after a fashion.

The music? Oh that's all loud, fast, frenetic and kind of blurs together, though the guy on guitar really knows how to play. Interestingly, Ryan's voice goes higher here (unless someone else is also joining in on the vocals) and the music does sort of slow down with a kind of death roar from what is perhaps the chorus, as Ryan's voice gets more sibilant and evil. Let's just say these guys won't be likely to be meeting Slayer at the church on Sunday any time soon, unless they're also hooking up with Varg and are carrying petrol cans... I do like the clever lyricism, almost poetry, like ”Blood into wine/ But all is fair in blood and gore”. Can't say the same about “A living, breathing piece of defecating meat” --- the lyric doesn't impress me and there's just so much self-hatred there that it's hard to read. The music hammers along but also slows down at certain points and there's even a guitar solo of sorts.


One of the single most annoying and self-satisfied creatures on the Earth: A Vegan

I confess I don't understand the idea behind “Forced gender reassignment”. Seems to be more a song about sexual torture, whereas I thought it might be about the idea of being born into the body of one gender while feeling you belong to another. I guess sympathy for such a condition was a little too much to expect. Some of the lyrics here make Slayer's seem mild by comparison! I feel they're too graphic and don't intend to write any (yeah I know: pussy) and so on to “Gristle licker”, which does at least paraphrase Oppenheimer when Ryan snarls ”I am become death, destroyer of humans” Possibly very appropriate, as the “father of the atom bomb” was quoting the Hindu god Shiva when he said that. The guitars get so fast here they actually squeal while Ryan growls and roars and slavers, then it slows down on a sort of marching punching beat, and again we get something very like a guitar solo, almost neo-classical at times, before it takes off again. There's actually quite a catchy melody in the final moments of this song, something which totally took me by surprise.

I do apologise for the lack of musical description here, but you guys know how I loathe grindcore and to be fair it's very hard to describe, as there's little real variation in it at all. So I'm doing the best I can and again this is why I need Batty to help me here. Women get it next in “Projectile Ovulation”, where they're blamed --- but in fairness, only partially --- for the birth of man, with lines like ”The uterus as weapon” and ”One half of the reason for overpopulation”. It does seem odd however to make a statement as they do at the end which says ”All genders, all humans are disgusting wretched pigs for the slaughter” --- firstly, I thought they loved all animals so why are pigs “disgusting”? And secondly, don't they realise they are humans too? So they're advocating their own destruction? Lot of self-hate here it would seem.

Probably nobody who listens to Cattle Decapitation bothers to take too much notice of the lyrics, but they're pretty self-defeating really. You can't curse your own race: what happens to you? You're a part of that race. Sure, this is no perfect world and there are horrors being perpetrated across it every single minute of every single day, and some of that needs to be addressed, but this is about as dark and pessimistic as it gets. It's not that it's necessarily upsetting me, but it certainly does make the sun shine just a little more weakly and less friendly as I write. Still, as they say, it's only rock'n'roll, innit?

The guy knows what he's talking about though, even if his argument is what I suppose Frownland would call a strawman, and he knows how to use some good references, as when he speaks of the snake Ouroboros in “Lifestalker”, and declares "We're all undertakers, rapists, future failures”. Really gives you the incentive to go on, doesn't it? What ever happened to songs about fluffy bunnies? Or at least, beer and women's legs? But then we get lines like ”Life is a nightmare/ I'm living a lifemare” in “Do not resuscitate” and later in “Your disposal” we hear the title of the album when he sneers ”There stands the monolith of inhumanity/An indestructible testimony to a technological society.” Interestingly, “Lifestalker” changes for a short minute or so into almost a traditional metal song, ie I can hear the melody, make out the lyric. Doesn't last of course, but it's a nice change and shows there's certainly some versatility within the band. We get this during “Your disposal” too, when it's almost like Noddy Holder has gone metal! Oh, and the song fucking FADES!!!

Above: How to seriously piss off Travis Ryan!

“The Monolith”, then, is a short song, in terms of lyrics, with only eight lines in all, and very slow and atmopsheric for once. Quite a shock to be honest: I hadn't expected anything at all like this. Ryan's vocal is quite excellent, now that for once I can make it out, and the pain and anguish in it leaks into every word. He recreates the myth of human religion with his characteristic snarling twist as he grits ”Here in the garden we know not what to do/ Made to lie in pastures green/Left to die unclean/ If we were promised Heaven then why put them through Hell?/ If we were promised Heaven then why are we in Hell?” I'm not entirely sure if he's referring to humans here or animals (“Lying in pastures of green”) but he revisits this theme even more darkly when he reaches the final track, where everything goes back to normal, ie lightspeed guitar with screaming and growling, and in “Kingdom of tyrants” he puts yet another twist on the lyric: ”Here in the garden we know not what to do/ Made to lie in pastures of filth/Left to die, guilty of nothing/ If we were promised Heaven then why are we in Hell?” Why indeed? After hearing this album I kind of feel like I've visited that dark place.

As I can't really talk too much about the music and much of the lyrics are too visceral for me, I'd like to fill up more space by challenging Travis Ryan's ideology, his vision of a perfect world where nobody eats meat. I'm going to assume the “humans must die” thing is not all that serious: after all, if he or one of his bandmembers were to have a child, do I really believe they would look on it as a thing of disgust? Or if their friends have children, do they turn their stomachs when they see them? I think it's fair to assume that that part of the message is for shock value mostly; I can't believe they actually feel that way. If they do, why go on living? So let's put that to one side and look at the possibilities in a non-meat-eating world.

I see three major problems with this: one, I doubt everyone can subsist on vegetables, roots and berries. Some people are weaker or sicker than others and need meat in their diet. Two, if we were to stop slaughtering animals for food, and assuming they kept breeding naturally, would we not soon be fighting them for living space and natural resources? Don't cows release methane into the atmosphere, and couldn't a herd of sheep, horses or cows eat far more than we could, eating all the grain and drinking all the water? I've nothing again vegetarians, but I think it's impractical to think everyone could live that way. Finally, what about the consequences to the economy? If everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow, burger chains like MacDonalds would close (hooray) with the resultant loss of millions if not billions of jobs, a massive downturn in the economy as farmers found they could not earn a living, and the whole industry built on consumerism and food would collapse, plunging us into some terrible dark age. Is this what Cattle Decapitation want?

Full tracklistlng and ratings (all lyrics by Travis Ryan, all music by Cattle Decapitation)

1. The carbon stampede (3:39)
2. Dead set on suicide (3:18)
3. A living, breathing piece of defecating meat (2:58)
4. Forced gender reassignment (3:54)
5. Gristle licker (4:54)
6. Projectile ovulation (3:31)
7. Lifestalker (4:15)
8. Do not resuscitate (3:18)
9. Your disposal (4:47)
10. The Monolith (3:39)
11. Kingdom of tyrants (4:50)

Album total running time: 43:03

Bonus track on Japanese edition

1. An exposition of insides (3:36)

Final word: There are no doubt going to be many albums like this, that simply do not speak to me either musically or lyrically. This one has nothing for me: while I agree that Ryan is a clever and accomplished wordsmith I do not share his point of view in any way, and his lyrics make me feel disgusted, ashamed and guilty. At the same time, I am not about to give up meat and eat (shudder) vegetables for the rest of my life. So in terms of his and Cattle Decapitation's message, which can certainly be seen to be arrogant and pushy, all I have to say is fuck you guys, I'll eat what I like.

And remember, if it had half a chance a cow would kill you and everyone you care about!

Oh, and I hated the music too. Mostly.

Final rating (mostly for the lyrics):

Note: The ratings here are a personal thing. They're based not only on how well known the album is and how well it's played and written, but how much, if at all, I enjoyed it. There is no need to take my ratings as gospel, and if you want to hear from actual fans of albums I rate low, then check the list and read what the people who put them on that list have to say about them. Now go away and let me eat my burger!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Wpnfire

you just can't ever stop making more work for yourself can you?

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The Batlord

Yeah, I've never given much of a **** about Cattle Decapitation. About a million bands doing exactly what they're doing, and the only thing that makes CD stand out is their whole vegetarian thing.

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Trollheart

It's not that (but yes): I couldn't see myself discussing the music like I did with the Maiden one so I wanted to make sure there was some sort of informed review. Also, yes, I felt like challenging the whole idea of "people eat meat bad, people no eat meat good." It's not as black and white as they make it out to be. Finally, I needed something to distract me from the terrible music and nasty lyrics...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018