CATTLE DECAPITATION Medium Rarities

METAL BLADE

Choice offcuts from San Diego’s deathgrind visionaries

Kicking off with the subfive-minute split with the dog-fronted Caninus, which covers the breadth of Turn On The Master’s punishing drawl and the 0.5-second blip of The Recapitation Of Cattle, these assembled demos and b-sides mainly cover the band’s earlier years before their more open-ended evolution over the last decade. The demos from debut EP Human Jerky are suitably raw and unhinged, while the long-lost recording Rotting Children For Remote Viewing from first album To Serve Man is a maelstrom of riffs and clattering percussion. However, it’s the last three tracks where the grander ideas of recent releases begin to emerge, with

An Exposition Of Insides and No Light And No Life’s precision riffs and frontman Travis Ryan showing his versatility with those perverse vocals. A collector’s collection that should still be on the menu for the Californians’ dedicated admirers.

FOR FANS OF: Misery Index, Cephalic Carnage, Aborted

ADAM REES