Cattle Decapitation - Humanure

The predecessor to the amazingly advanced Karma, Bloody Karma, Humanure struck me comparatively as quite a bit less mature and intricate, or at least to my ears it sounds like quite a leap. Comparing the riffs between the two albums, many of those on Humanure sound quite a bit more simple and direct without the same amount of research the themes written for KBK entailed. The production doesn’t seem to be quite as good for this one, maybe a bit too bassy, even if that does give the low end a bit of a kick. Seeing how fast this band has developed, one hopes any further work would take such commeasurate leaps.

Anima - Sturmischler Himmel

Can’t remember if this was the Ohr or Pilz Anima off the bat, which means I no longer have those labels practically memorized after searching most of them down. I guess I originally avoided Anima as they were more of a new music outfit than the psychedelic rock, folk and electronic groups that would dominate the labels. Well Anima are certainly as psychedelic as the rest of the bands, starting with a bizarre sound collage of sheep noises and found sounds that evoked Pink Floyd from a year or two earlier. The rest of the album is off the map with bizarre sounds and musique concret collages, putting this close to the vanguard of their label while perhaps being one of the least listenable. For Nurse With Wound fans and other experimentalists.

Deicide - Deicide

Big scary early death metal classic, the debut of the band with “the one with the cross burnt into his forehead.” Although the songs here are pretty short, there’s already a reliance on complicated riffing that would become more elaborate on the band’s follow up Legion and with that album I’d learned my lesson about reading along with the lyric book. This just brings me back to the days of Morbid Angel, Obsessed, Nocturnus and others where death metal hadn’t quite the same pure nihilist and atheist streaks and the bands all sounded like they’d grown up on Hammer horror movies and Anton LaVey books. The atmospheres are all inverted, angry and grim, something that would really never leave the paradigm. Good stuff.