My first exposure to Cattle Decapitation was on their earlier goregrind releases. The sound was nothing special and was just your average, shittily produced goregrind. Ever since being signed to Metal Blade, though, Cattle Decapitation had begun to clean up their sound and become a lot tighter and more technical. However, I stayed away from To Serve Man for the longest time, more or less unimpressed with what I heard. When I finally got news of Cattle Decapitation "getting it right" on Humanure I decided to give the album a go.

Cattle Decapitation certainly did grow as a band: their production is a fuckton cleaner than their past releases and the band is at the top of their technical prowess. The music is all over the place and actually really decent, contrary to what a few members’ involvement in The Locust’s Safety Second, Body Last EP (possibly the most horrid piece of music ever conceived to the mind of modern man) might lend one to believe. The band has long since abandoned their grind ways and has embraced straight on death metal.

However, despite these improvements, Cattle Decapitation leaves an assload to be desired. While they got the varied technical chops down, the musical writing still leaves a lot to be desired. There is nothing really that’s going to make you pick this up over any of the other technical death metal releases from the past few years. It’s good musicianship and hardly static, but why pick up this when one can get tech grind lunatics Commit Suicide’s Synthetics?

Similarly, Travis Ryan’s vocals are hardly exemplary. He doubles on high and low end duties much in the vein of Deicide. Half the time he sounds like he’s simply pulling a Glenn "Strawberry Cupcake" Benton impersonation, somewhat sounding slightly better than Benton, but the other half the time his low ends sound like he’s gobbling cock while he growls. There are times where I’m wondering if he’s betraying his vegan heritage and gobbling some man-sausage in the recording booth. Then again, it could be a really endowed cucumber.

Then there is the matter of the outro song, "Men Before Swine". I honestly can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, grind-influenced attempt at being unsettling or if it’s a political message (what with Cattle Decapitation being vegans and the source of the sampling being PETA). If it’s the former it falls flat on its face because, well, this audience is here for grinding brutality and has pretty much heard every disgusting thing under the sun. Hearing a piggy/cow sound here or there and a massive load of machinery noise probably isn’t going to faze someone picking up Cattle Decapitation on a whim, much less hardened death metal and goregrind folks (Cattle Decapitation’s primary audience). If it’s there for a political message, well, the same applies. Chances are most folks aren’t going to really be set off by a couple of animal grunts; God knows they’ve heard worse things out of a pitch shifter. The only people that are really going to be affected by it would be someone already indoctrinated. Yeah, it fits the motif of Cattle Decapitation’s album, but from a practical stand-point it’s just useless filler.

Cattle Decapitation has shown a great deal of improvement, but they’re still faltering. At best, Humanure is decent. If you’re already a Cattle Decapitation fan, then by all means grab it as it technically is their best release. But if you’re not a fan, don’t bother. Cattle Decapitation has to yet to produce an album really deserving of the praise given to them.

Written By: Necro-tron