Cattle Decapitation, Electric Brixton (30/01/25)
31st January 2025Over their nearly thirty-year career, Cattle Decapitation have drifted from the ultra-intense blasts of sub-minute grind their first EPs were filled with, into genre-bending, high-concept tours of technicality. Gone are the ‘gore not core’ shirts, and in their place: a tour loaded with more pristine deathcore than crust punk.
Tonight’s openers, Vulvodynia, are designed to ‘make the craziest, most absurdly heavy music possible’. They might call themselves ‘slamming brutal death metal’, but their output is essentially just a checklist of deathcore tropes turned up to 11. Astonishingly fast blast beats? Check. Relentless changes of section, tempo, and vocal style? Check. Chaotic, ultra-technical sweep picking? Check. A breakdown with more half-times than any reasonably person requires? Check. A strangely out-of-place attempt at melody? Check. Despite a slightly ‘paint by numbers’ approach, it seems like their trip over from South Africa was worth it. They’re phenomenally tight and get the energy in the room up impressively quickly, and their set certainly evoked the most random askings of “What were they called again?”.Revocation are a bit more straightforward. The Boston band has been doing this for more than twenty years, and despite their progressive and technical influences, their sound is a lot thrashier (their most played song on Spotify is even a cover of ‘Dyer’s Eve’) than the other bands on tonight’s bill. They open with the frenzied gut-punch of ‘Diabolical Majesty’ before showing off a new song, ‘Confines Of Infinity’, which is a crushingly heavy downtempo track with a Morbid Angel vibe.Shadow Of Intent are technically co-headlining this tour, but I’m struggling to see many treating their set as the night’s main draw. The deathcore quartet was first formed as a studio-only project that played Halo-themed music, before expanding into something with a slightly less niche appeal. You can feel the cinematic grandeur of the franchise in their output, but I can’t help but feel like Shadow Of Intent was conceived as a studio band for a reason. The orchestral backing tracks are ever-present but uninspiring, turning something that could sound pretty huge and brutal into something just a bit… lame? Their newest single, ‘Flying The Black Flag’ is actually the highlight of the set, with its focus on brutality and groove providing a welcome break from the over-polished older cuts. But you can never fault a deathcore band’s ability to get a pit going.It is, of course, Cattle Decapitation that 90% of the crowd are here for. As they have done for a few years now, the band only performs tracks from their four most recent albums. It’s a shame that everything from their true grindcore era is omitted (especially when a fair few of the tracks would only take up about 20 seconds of the set), but it makes sense given it is this stylistic shift that has allowed them to embark on tours of this size in the first place.
They open with ‘The Carbon Stampede’ from 2012’s Monolith Of Inhumanity, which blasts its way through a series of tempo changes and instantly gives Travis Ryan’s incredible vocal range a workout. 2015’s The Anthropocene Extinction is sadly quite underrepresented in tonight’s setlist, but they waste no time showing off its centerpiece: ‘The Prophets Of Loss’. It’s another blisteringly heavy track (though I suppose they all are) that somehow manages to fit within it one of the catchiest melodies in extreme metal history.
The middle of the set leans heavily into their newest album, Terrasite. It’s far from their strongest release, but it doesn’t mess around. ‘We Eat Our Young’ explodes to life almost instantly, while ‘Scourge Of The Offspring’ is another demonstration of Travis Ryan’s incredible vocal range, moving from a brutal death metal grunt, through the grindcore scream, and into his completely unique take on ‘clean’ singing. ‘Bring Back The Plague’ further dives into the band’s inimitable blend of beauty and brutality, before ‘Forced Gender Reassignment’ brings you back to reality with its no-frills deep, dissonant chugging. That is, until someone in the crowd passes out and the track comes to an abrupt stop. The band is unfortunately forced to move on without finishing their most popular song, but the crowd are very understanding about it. Except the guy standing next to me. He simply muttered “what a fucking wanker” under his breath.
We might not be getting anything from the grindcore era, but ‘A Living, Breathing Piece Of Defecating Meat’ (not performed for six years before this tour) is arguably as close as we’re going to get. At the other end of the spectrum sits set closer, ‘Death Atlas’. It’s a ten-minute journey that seamlessly drifts from riff-driven death metal into an anthemic, mid-tempo outro that rounds off both Death Atlas and this set, encapsulating just why Cattle Decapitation are so far ahead of every other band on tonight’s lineup.
While there were a lot of interesting moments earlier in the night, this show was always going to be about Cattle Decapitation. And they’ve proven exactly why that is.
