An eye-popping, super limited deluxe picture disc LP version of Cattle Decapitation's last album, Karma Bloody Karma from 2006. I've actually become more and more of a fan of these guys in recent years; I thought that their Carcass-y gore/death metal was nice and brutal enough when they first started out, but over the course of the last few albums, Cattle Decap have grown into their own sound that moves beyond the early Necroticism worship and into a more melodic, nuanced brand of death metal that still sticks to their ongoing vegetarian/animal rights concept conveyed through horrific visions of human beings being subjected to brutal factory-farm death. Much like Carcass themselves, actually, but Cattle Decapitation make the allegory much more implicit through their nightmarish lyrics and pro-cattle imagery.

On Karma Bloody Karma, Cattle Decap plunge even deeper into a grisly, blood-and-bile splattered world of humans reduced to meat products, across eleven tracks that combine crushing death metal and flourishes of Euro/Swedish melodicism with blasting grindcore and the more experimental touches that the band has been injecting into their albums with increasing frequency. The songs are packed with insanely complex riffs that conceal surprisingly catchy hooks, bizarre stop/start arrangements, bass/ambient breakdowns and crushing midpaced thrash riffing, ridiculously squiggly guitar shred that borders on Necrophagist/Buckethead levels of fretboard clusterfuck and frenetic Orthrelm-ish single-note runs, ultra-intense grindcore executed with extreme precision, pummeling breakdowns and monstrous, noise-infested sludge parts, and a dueling vocal atack that pairs up impossibly deep beast-grunts with feral screams, all coming out of the mouth of singer Travis Ryan, and his schizophrenic vocals are pretty impressive. Fans of crushing, progressive death metal will undoubtedly drool over all over the more complex and epic direction that Cattle Decap has taken with Karma, and there are some cool surprises in here too, like the stuttering, seven minute tangle of death metal complexity and doomed dirge of "Alone In The Landfill", which eventually morphs into something not all that unlike a blackened Neurosis with sustained feedback and gloomy piano figures billowing like black smoke across the final minutes of the song; there are also undercurrents of electronic noise that appear in most of the tracks, provided by John Wiese, and these electronic textures and gritty layers of distortion adds to the feeling of unease recurrent through the album.

Karma is probably my favorite album from Cattle Decapitation so far, a crushing blast of grinding, conceptual death metal with experimental touches that sets this apart from most of their peers. The album came out on CD through Metal Blade in 2006, but Accident Prone just released this super-limited picture disc in a hand-numbered edition of 500 copies, packaged in a thick full color gatefold jacket with AWESOME embossed/raised artwork on the cover that has to be seen to be appreciated.