By Monk
Now and again, a song comes along that stops you dead in your tracks, put aside everything your doing, grab your nearest air guitar and thrash your head like a three-year-old pumped full of energy drinks… ‘Last Supper’, the final track on this, the eighth album (and the first in five years) by Polish death metal experts Decapitated does just that… and feck me, I nearly broke both my wrist and neck in the process…
But, in case you think it’s a case of keeping the best to last, well… it’s not quite. ‘Cancer Culture’ – a concept album about which its subject should be quite obvious – is a rich and eclectic offering, filled to the brim with traditional blackened melodeath memes and miens but at the same time not afraid to push the envelope just that little bit further, lulling you into false senses of security and luring you down back alleys you never expected to explore.
At first, you think you know what to expect. Intro ‘From The Nothingness With Love’ does just that: introduce us to what is to come. On repeated listens, you continuingly feel the dark sense of foreboding that lurks just below the surface, and also pervades the rest of the album, making itself increasingly prescient as the opus continues. The opening, title track at fist sounds like a fairly straightforward slice of blackened melodeath, but as you listen you can increasingly detect the senses of anger, fear and anxiety in Rasta’s frenetic delivery: it’s as if every word he sings is his last and he wants to get it out there before it is snatched away from him for all (im)mortality.
I said above about the album being a concept piece: that’s perhaps somewhat of a misnomer, as it is split into two distinct sections, both of which address a similar issue but on different levels. The first part addresses the effect of cancer on the human body, the second more global issues. They nevertheless are two issues which inexorably intertwined, and Decapitated do so with emphatic intent and results.
MachineHead’s Robb Flynn makes an appearance on ‘Iconoclast’, the introduction to the second half of the album, and in doing so helps signify the chance in direction and sound that occurs as this point, as everything becomes more measured and contradictory. The first half of the album possesses a sense of hopelessness, a mood that defines how many feel about the “Big C”: “oh shit, there’s not much I can do about it…” And that sense of helplessness also pervades the second half, but it is also coupled with a light that occasionally shines through in the first part, which is that if way can rail against our adversities and stand up to our circumstances then we can overcome and buy ourselves (in)valuable time…
Like so many albums and artists, ‘Cancer Culture’ sees Decapitated emerging from the pain inflicted on us all over the past two years. And, like so many of those albums and artists, it sees them do so with determination and defiance. We are still here, and we WILL overcome the cancerous culture in our bodies and our society. And this is the soundtrack to help us do so.
- ‘Cancer Culture’ is out now. You can get your copy HERE.
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