The last 2 Cattle Decapitation albums 2015’s The Anthropocene Extinction and 2019’s Death Atlas and saw the band’s venomous grinding and technical death metal take on an at times a more accessible turn alongside the unhinged brutality and the band gained plaudits across the board for doing this. Cattle Decapitation continue to forge their forward thinking extreme music along to new plateaus with their latest opus Terrasite, which sees the band amp up the heaviness but keep that air of assured melody which works brilliantly at a consistent level.
Terrasite starts as it means to go on with ‘Terrasitic Adaptation’, a formidably haunting intro complete with some simply incredible drumming from Dave McGraw and Travis Ryan’s incredible vocals which seem to get better with each release that Cattle Decapitation bring out, and when his brutally piercing wail transforms effortlessly into his clean singing voice, as it does so often during the album, the results are breathtaking.
These breathtaking moments are high points throughout Terrasite with each track on the album further demonstrating how a forward thinking a band Cattle Decapitation are. From the epic ‘Scourge Of The Offspring’ and the pummelling groove of ‘The Storm Upstairs’ to the berserk noise of ‘Dead End Residents’, Cattle Decapitation go for the jugular with their razor sharp music but this is not just heaviness for heaviness sake as there are so many vibrant ideas perfectly executed in here as well.
Take, for example, the track that the album ends with, ‘Just Another Body’, which starts with a heartbreakingly beautiful and mournful piano led intro, and morphs as it goes into into an almost progressive metal opus that is truly epic, with bursts of the bands brutal metal adding to the experience as well. This is a song (as happens constantly in Terrasite) that you can’t help but be mesmerised by and overwhelmed by what you have just heard and it definitely shows the scope and soul of Cattle Decapitation music, something that continues to grow from album to album.
Terrasite is another instant metal classic from Cattle Decapitation and sees the band continue to do things on their own terms with an album that is horrifically heavy, triumphantly catchy as hell and packed full of fully formed metal anthems.
