It goes without saying that Cattle Decapitation is one of the most important and revered extreme metal bands in the world and have been for the last decade. They demand attention and get it! Which is exactly what the sell out Melbourne crowd expected and got last Saturday night.
But let’s rewind…and start at the beginning. Opening the evening was Melbourne’s own extreme metal tyrants Body Prison. This was my first experience both seeing and hearing them and what a fucking set. Categorise as extreme melo-death grind with all kinds of brutal. Absolutely fucking killer band that are very active in the local scene and make sure you get Body Prison into your playlists by any means possible.
Next up were touring mates with Cattle, Fallujah, who I will admit have never really been on my essential listening radar, I do enjoy it when they “shuffle” onto one of my many music streaming services. I thought their 2022 release Empyrean was ok but didn’t really connect with me greatly in any way by the mere fact that there is so much of the “same” kind of box ticking tech-death floating around, but that in no way reflects my opinion of their live show. Fallujah were fantastic, and the crowd soaked up every bit of technical magnificence that they could exude.
But make no mistake, we were here to digest the Cattle Decapitation experience! This band is easily in my top ten favorite bands of all time, they evolve, mature and become more influential with every release. No one point of their incarnations or member changes have slowed down or diminished their evolution. In fact with each change CD have only, it would seem, harnessed some inner extreme metal greatness that even their peers could hope to encapsulate. Saturday night’s show proved that and then some! Case in point, name me one band reader that would demand a crowd sing along to a death grind song? Nope, I can’t name one either in the many gigs I have attended, but when the crowd lost their minds for the intro of Bring Back The Plague and sung along to the chorus, we were all in the palm of Travis Ryan’s palm, hypnotised by the perfection that is Cattle Decapitation.
Not to mention the audience participation in screaming alone to Terrasitic Adaptation and We Eat Our Young. Covering only their last four releases (which is plenty enough) I left The Croxton with a big fuck off shit eating grin on my face if only to of heard Forced Gender Reassignment live which is very pertinent to the society in which we live in today!
