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Cattle Decapitation
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 16-Nov-05 @ 04:39 PM
HQ: San Diego, CA
NOW PLAYING: Humanure (METAL BLADE; metalblade.com) WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW 'EM:These guys take the "meat" out of "metal," but their songs are still as bloody as a rare steak. YOU LIKE? YOU'LL LIKE: Carcass/ Impaled / Cannibal Corpse "Poor, dead kitty," Travis Ryan thought, looking at the lifeless feline he'd found in a field. He reached out and petted it gingerly with his foot, which, much to his dismay, caused its head to become unhinged. "You could see its crispy, dried-up brain," Ryan recalls. Such are the formative experiences that spawn grindcore juggernauts. Ryan graduated from inadvertent cat decapitation to Cattle Decapitation, a whirling death-metal dervish that once included David Astor and Gabe Serbian of the Locust. After signing to Metal Blade, the veggie-friendly group sharpened their technical edge, adding straight-razor solos and pacemaker-set-to-hummingbird drumbeats, but their animal-rights message has remained brutally intense through all their incarnations. Early discs such as Human Jerky (the group donned repulsive beef-jerky masks during this tour) and Homovore used a ghastly glossary to depict slaughterhouse splatter. In disgusting detail, Cattle Decapitation described pungent stenches and oozing bodily fluids. With To Serve Man, a virtual cannibal cookbook, and this year's Humanure, the band changed their focus from pro-animal to anti-human. "Without people, this would be a paradise," Ryan says. To him, humans are contemptible corruptors celebrating their own crapulence. Illustrating that concept is Humanure's spectacularly sickening album artwork: A bovine behemoth expels a torrential tide of sliced-vein scarlet and squatting-dog brown, with human faces inside the feces. Several chain stores refused to stock the crapping-cow cover, so Cattle Decapitation reluctantly issued an alternate barren-wasteland design. Ryan finds it fascinating that no one has asked him to alter the album's lyrical content, given that Humanure delivers more graphic gore than a slasher-movie marathon. "The words are much more threatening, but I haven't heard anything about them," Ryan says. "I guess that won't come up unless someone kills themselves and our lyrics are smeared in blood on the wall." -Andrew Miller |
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