Heavy Song of the Week is a new feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week the top spot goes to Cattle Decapitation’s “We Eat Our Young.”
When most bands announce a new album, they release a promotional single to tease their new music. Not Cattle Decapitation. Upon unveiling Terrasite (out May 12th), they merely offered up the album’s grim premise: Earth as a wasteland haunted by post-Anthropocene humanity, aka terrasites (think humans as cockroaches and you’re getting warmer). The apocalypse has been a running theme throughout Cattle Decapitation’s most recent albums, but here, they let that message sink in before putting music to it.
This week, the band finally broke its silence with the lead single “We Eat Our Young.” It’s a perplexingly technical death metal/grind workout, structured around jackhammer blast beats and wonky rhythms — a fine palette for the doomsaying of vocalist Travis Ryan. There’s something here for prog and death metal fans alike, as the band once again manages to depict our seemingly grim future through sonic brutality.
— Jon Hadusek,
Senior Staff Writer
Honorable Mentions
Dommengang – “Society Blues”
Portland’s Dommengang return with their fourth album Wished Eye on April 21st via Thrill Jockey and offer up a fine appetizer in the form of “Society Blues.” Scalding wah-wah leads of the Mascis strain highlight this five-minute slab of heavy psych, with Dommengang embracing the genre’s inherent anachronisms rather than arbitrarily suppressing them. Electric guitars and fuzz boxes are the name of the game, and this band wields ’em mightily.
Jesus Piece – “Tunnel Vision”
Hardcore is having a renaissance of sorts, and it’s because of songs like “Tunnel Vision.” It’s the sound of a band actively pushing its own extremes, and the arena of hardcore is conducive to such evolution (as opposed to say, the heavy psych of Dommengang mentioned above, where it pays to stay in genre’s established wheelhouse). Here, Jesus Piece up the technicality and the sheer sonic force for one of their most intense and physical performances to date. A surefire mosh igniter if the band busts it out on tour with Show Me the Body.
Periphery -“Atropos”
Periphery’s latest single “ Atropos” is, in a word, cinematic. The amount of labor and work that must have gone into the writing and production of this eight-minute piece is astounding — every note and texture comes off as calculated and considered. The vocal arrangement and shifts from clean to harsh singing are impressive in their own right, but to meld them to equally dynamic and technical guitarwork? Whew. Maybe djent isn’t a genre, but whatever you want to call this, Periphery have mastered it.
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