All of Cattle Decapitation's albums for Metal Blade have shown the band to be continously progressing into more complex, epic realms of grinding death metal, always staying true to their human-as-meat-product allegory and hardcore pro-vegetarian outlook, and on their last album Karma Bloody Karma, the San Diego goregrinders ventured into their most melodic, intricate territory yet, combining ultra-squiggly guitar shred with Gothenburg-sized melodic riffage and complex grind arrangements that made for their best album to date. Sometimes when I'm listening to newer Cattle Decap, I forget just how raw and chaotic the band was when they first started out, but with this picture disc version of Cattle Decap's debut album Human Jerky, I'm provided with a refresher course on their early stages. Released by Accident Prone in a hand-numbered edition of 1500 copies and packaged in a clear mylar sleeve, this features the eighteen-song debut on a full color pic disc emblazoned with the album's ridiculously gruesome artwork that might just turn you off to burgers for a while.

It's also easy to forget that Cattle Decapitation was mostly thought of as a side project of synth-grinders The Locust in the beginning. The original LP for Human Jerky was snatched up by hardcore kids when it came out based on the crazy buzz that the Locust had in the late 90's, but the horrific racket that oozed off of that slab was far removed from the synthoid spazz-blast of the Locust. The main thing that connected the two bands, aside from members David Astor and Gabe Serbian, was a common lust for noise, and the sonic havoc that these guys splooged all over their debut made Human Jerky more convoluted and messed up than yer typical Carcass-clone. Don't get me wrong, the influence of early Carcass classics Necroticism and Symphonies is felt all over Cattle Decapitation's brutal gore-splattered grindcore, but the arrangements on this album are a both insanely complicated and sloppily handled, with that freaked out hyperspeed squiggle shredding and contorted riffing packed into super-dense minute long songs and doused in low-fi noise and clotted crud, the whole sonic assault coming in at just under seventeen minutes. Superfast, fucked up grind violence that, in hindsight, actually has alot in common with the screwey death/grind of Hatewave.