Band:	Cattle Decapitation
Album:	Death Atlas
Style:	Deathgrind, Death metal, Grindcore
Release date:	November 2019

01. Anthropogenic: End Transmission [feat. Riccardo Conforti]
02. The Geocide
03. Be Still Our Bleeding Hearts
04. Vulturous
05. The Great Dying [feat. Melissa Lucas-Harlow]
06. One Day Closer To The End Of The World
07. Bring Back The Plague
08. Absolute Destitute
09. The Great Dying II
10. Finish Them
11. With All Disrespect
12. Time's Cruel Curtain
13. The Unerasable Past [feat. John Fishman & Tony Parker]
14. Death Atlas [feat. Laure Le Prunenec]
15. An Extreme Indifference To Human Life [bonus]
16. In The Kingdom Of The Blind, The One-Eyed Are Kings [Dead Can Dance cover] [feat. Ottone Pesante] [bonus]

Back with another slab of some the hardest hitting tech death you will hear, Cattle Decapitation return on their eighth album still full of purpose and urgency; this is a fire that is still clearly raging within the band. Armed with some tweaks to their classic formula, the band offer up their most varied album to date, while not easing off on the grind sound at all. A soundtrack to the end of the world, if you aren't filled with existential dread by the end of this then clearly you weren't listening close enough.

With a clear focus on the theme of environmental and human collapse, the band take us through eleven tracks (and three intermissions) of sheer audio violence that sound like they are trying to shake you out of a coma. To raise above the noise of everyday life, the band crank It up to eleven and make themselves heard. The band's utilization of spoken word intermissions adds a dynamic that is oft missing from such charged albums, allowing the band to extol their message without forcing it into songs where they may not fit, while also ratcheting up the urgency of the music. The band's managed use of these intermissions means the band does not overdo it and it does not feel like it's detracting from the music.

Vocalist Travis Ryan adopts clean tones for segments of this album that burnish the more restrained sections of the music, though when he does return to his trademark guttural vocals, it sounds at one with the instrumentation behind him, adding its weight to the blow when the band decide to kick it into high gear. The rest of the band are on top form, and manage to switch between lighter passages and their all-out audio assault with an ease that makes you wonder why it's not been utilized much more often before.

This new mix of sounds is perfected on tracks like "Bring Back The Plague", "With All Disrespect" and "One Day Closer...", songs that are sure to be mainstays in any future compilations from the band. The album is full of great tracks; pick any one at random and you will be more likely to hit a good song than a bad song, with only "Death Atlas" being marred by it's overlong duration as it tries to ape a grandiosity to end the album on. However, even then it isn't a bad song in the grand scheme of things. Each song has a purpose and lyrics that will make anybody with a weak constitution a puddle of existential dread.

A must for any fan of the band or those who like their music turned all the way to eleven, to continue to push further heights eight albums in is a commendable feat for any band. Turn on, tune in and drop out of existence; see you on the other side.