The Wake

[this post is part 2 of a 6-part series called "A Critical Investigation of Cattle Decapitation’s Six Full-Length Albums"]

Label: Three-One-G
Runtime: 21:39
Tracks: 16

The sound:

This album sounds pretty much like the last one, just better-produced. Though the guitar tone is the same, you can hear it much clearer, and the same goes for the drums and vocals. The low-end vocals are a little higher in the mix this time, and you can hear pretty much every bump in Travis Ryan’s throat. I liked it better when everything was muddy, because when you can hear everything clearly it stands out a lot more how sloppy they play. The drummer especially. I don’t know who was drumming for Cattle Decap on this record, but if he ever asks you to join your band, don’t let him. The first track on this record is a goddamn epic at three minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and there are three other tracks over two minutes on the album, all four of which resort to extended periods of chugging with varying degrees of lack of success. The few decent moments on this album are the straightforward grind/thrash parts, but they keep attempting grooves and nonstandard chord progressions and failing horribly. You can tell that they were trying to break out of grind formulas with this record, but it’s not working for them; this is probably the worst grind album I’ve ever heard.

The rhetoric:

Lyrical themes involve humans being eaten, sometimes by animals and sometimes by other humans, general pointless human carnage, disgusting fantasies of deformed freaks, and the gross-just-to-be-gross. The humans being eaten songs are pretty clearly attempts to provide a vegan shock to listeners dedicated enough to read the lyric sheets and think about them by recontextualizing the things we’re all desensitized to from PETA ads, making them shocking again by applying them to humans. The rest is just a manifestation of Cattle Decapitation’s allegiance to gore. There is a song that starts with a sample that says, “To know death, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.” There’s a song about shitting into a tube going into your mouth.

John Steinbeck is in agreement with this band on considering mechanized farming to be the brutal rape of nature.

There is a song about interbreeding between cattle and men:

“Brand new strain of tender meat
Half bovine
Half man
All beef”

Song titles of note:

“Open Human Head Experiments With Bleach Lacquer And Epoxy”
“Colostomy Jigsaw Puzzle”
“The Roadside Dead (Detrunked Stumpification Through Roadrash)”
“Bathing In A Grease Disposal Unit”

Lyrics of note:

“An excursion in science
Becomes a bloodbath hosted by nature
…
Blunt force facial restructurization”
from “Mauled”

“Bumbling retard with scab for a head”
from “Open Human Head Experiments…”

Two full songs, because they’re pretty great:

“Joined At The Ass”

“Freak of unthinkable proportions
Perfect candidate for abortion
Future double-suicide from shotgun blast
Rectally twins-and joined at the ass
Some things deserve to die
Severed siblings with a surgical knife
Buildup of waste at articulation
Installed colostomy for shit irrigation
Purchased for science and mutant research
Human guinea pig
Waste not, want not
How can there be a god
That brings atrocities to its creation
Born into hell-mandatory torment
Biologically malformed, existance is futile
We bring disease
And physiological agony
Nobody ever said that life was easy”

“Wine Of The Sanguine”

“This is my body
Pourous, flagella-like due to decomp.
This is my blood
Fermented well-aged sanguine
Putrid cocktail
Decayed red blood cells now reliquefy
Human pruno of dead blood
Absinthe of rotted plasma
Drunk of the fluids that once flowed
Hallucinations due to prolonged fermentation
Menstrual sauvignon ”

And what is basically the Cattle Decap Manifesto:

“It’s all around you
In the air you breathe
In the food you eat
In the bed you sleep
In the rotting meat
Ever looming presence of rot and disease
…
Fuck this world we live in
And fuck its ugly inhabitants
Long live the stench”
from “Human Jerky and the Active Cultures”