Coming in as a new fan of Cattle Decapitation, my set of expectations are different than long time fans. I heard Death Atlas at release, promptly shrugged it off as a bland effort at extreme metal and went on with my year. Hearing the preview tracks for Terrasite, though, set me looking for what are considered some of their better albums and thus I found, and was taken with, The Anthropocene Extinction and Monolith of Inhumanity. So with one complete dud and two compelling albums in tow, my expectations for the new album were set to cautiously optimistic. At first, it seems that Terrasite delivers. The intense sound and great vocal attack is intact, as well as some of the immensely misanthropic and nasal cleans that precede whiplash moments into extremity. But as I have spun the album a few times, flaws start to float to the surface of the slaughterhouse waste bucket.
Bookends “Terrasitic Adaptation” and “Just Another Body” dwell on the unsuccessful black metal influence that made Death Atlas a chore to sit through. With the drums and vocals being particularly active, the guitar spends its time on uninteresting tremolo riffs and these songs build without any good payoff. This plodding style creeps into some of the death metal-forward songs as well, where the songs set all aside save plodding extremity that connects poorly to what follows (see “The Insignificants”). In addition to this, a lot of the writing seem focused on making room for cleanly sung refrains that at times sound like 90’s Pop or RnB in their cadence. Moments like in “…and the World Will Go on Without You” and “Just Another Body” are an odd fit for a band like this and looks like a cynical attempt to appeal to fans of the more melodic genres of metal. I cannot say that it is all bad, however, as the songs picked for the singles are quite good and remind me of what pulled me in to albums like Anthropocene… and Monolith… in the first place. “Scourge of the Offspring” plays around with some light syncopation, throws in a slam and actually pulls off a worthwhile cleanly sung moment. “A Photic Doom” focuses on varied drum rhythms and adds a colorful solo above a slam, finishing off the song in a neat crescendo. I walk away from Terrasite thinking that it is fine but that it spends a lot of its already lengthy runtime chasing ideas that do not come together as well as they could.
