Review by Daniel for Cattle Decapitation - Monolith of Inhumanity (2012)

I certainly came in at the right time with San Diego-based extreme metallers Cattle Decapitation given that they didn’t come to my attention until their 2009 sixth album “The Harvest Floor” which I found to be a pretty enjoyable piece of deathgrind. I’d soon find out that the remainder of the band’s back catalogue wasn’t really up to the same sort of standard but 2012’s “Monolith of Inhumanity” is where things got really interesting & it’d go on to become a pretty big record for me that year. Cattle Decapitation’s most highly praised release sees them drawing upon all of the influences they’d presented throughout their career to the time & combines them with a few fresh new ideas & a highly professional execution to create a release that almost transcends its deathgrind genre-tagging.

Cattle Decapitation's seventh full-length provides a wealth of evidence that the band are a highly talented group of instrumentalists, whether that be through the inclusion of technical riffs structures & melodic sweep-picked guitar solos or the consistently jaw-dropping velocities & endurance of grindcore drummer David McGraw who benefits from a clicky, modern drum sound that showcases his incredible precision to a tee. The production is spot-on which gives the song-writing the extra oomph required to relentlessly slaughter any hopes the listener may have had around reaching a position of safety before they’re unceremoniously gutted in a public forum for all to see. But the main attraction here is front man Travis Ryan whose impressive array of super-gutteral extreme metal vocals is a constant source of interest. He reaches almost inhuman levels of depth at times & is a real breathe of fresh air (if that’s possible for a death growler). The use of Devin Townsend-style clean (well… screamed but clean-er) vocals is an interesting touch too, as is the use of black metal shrieks over tremolo-picked, open-string black metal riffs that remind me a lot of Emperor.

This is some pretty brutal stuff it has to be said. As someone who is forever on the lookout for ever more violent examples of metal music, this record was always going to tick my boxes. The tracklisting is super-consistent as there’s nothing even remotely close to a drop in quality across the 43-minute runtime. I particularly love the ultra-brutal “Forced Gender Assignment” but for me the highlight is actually the change-up track in the dark ambience of post-rocker “The Monolith”. I have to ask how many extreme metal bands are capable of that then, eh? It’s attributes like this that see “Monolith of Inhumanity” sitting in rare territory in that it will not only satisfy fans of savage deathgrind outfits like Cephalic Carnage, Misery Index & Circle of Dead Children but it also possesses enough class to break outside of those circles into a more sophisticated market. I’m not sure Cattle Decapitation have produced a better release than this one to be honest.