The Harvest Floor [PA] (CD - 2009)

Audio Mixer: Billy Anderson.

San Diego's Cattle Decapitation is not your typical grindcore act. While many of their genre peers use gore and dismemberment imagery for shock value, they employ "slaughter" with a specific purpose in mind. Longtime animal-rights activists, the band uses the tools of grindcore and death metal to craft hellish soundscapes that conjure the horrors of the meatpacking plant. With most songs over 3:00, THE HARVEST FLOOR stretches out the traditional boundaries of grind, allowing songs like the album-ending "Regret and The Grave" to build an atmosphere of black metal menace among the furious drums and scorched vocals.

I don't know about you, but Cattle Decapitation certainly gets my vote for most "colorful" name of an extreme metal band of recent memory. And for over a decade by this point, the group has certainly been unleashing the fury and continue to do so on their 2009 release, Harvest Floor. Produced by a chap who is no stranger to pushing sonic boundaries for albums he oversees, Billy Anderson (whose credits include the Melvins, Mr. Bungle, etc.), Harvest Floor certainly doesn't disappoint, as it follows the same blueprint laid down on the group's previous offerings -- extreme metal at its most complex and brutal. And Cattle Decapitation's gift of coming up with glorious song titles remains very much intact, as evidenced by the presence of such ditties as "We Are Horrible People," "Tooth Enamel and Concrete," and especially, "Into the Public Bath." ~ Greg Prato minimize