Cattle Decapitation

California's Cattle Decapitation has entered the upper realm of gore-grinders (not the hardest thing in the world to do, but it's still pretty cool) with To Serve Man. What sets them apart from contemporaries Exhumed and Impaled is a nice, clear production sound (i.e., it doesn't sound like diarrhoea) that allows us to hear exactly what it is that gore-grind bands do with their instruments: grind, slash and hack their way through speedy and short bursts of dissonant grindcore. It sounds familiar, but that's due to the one-trick pony nature of this sub-genre, not because the band can't do more than this monotonous belch of a sound, which they actually do better than most. The brilliant thing about Cattle Decapitation, apart from the fact that this CD is priced cheap, is that the band is using the disgusting gore imagery as a metaphor for animal consumption, not unlike old Carcass. The title of the album itself is clever in its irony; kudos to the boys for bringing a message as vital as animal rights to the metal arena.