Cephalic Carnage - Lucid Interval (Relapse)

I really, really, really want to love Cephalic Carnage. These 5 guys from Colorado are incredibly talented musicians and have quite a few fresh ideas to bring to the rapidly collapsing death/grind genres. Problem is that much of the first half of this album is spent treading water. There's a whole lot of 'brutal' mosh-death [Suffocation worship] to be found amongst the first few tracks on Lucid Interval, and that's not something that can't be heard from dozens upon dozens of other newer death metal bands. Actually, there are moments of sheer brilliance in the early part of the album as well, namely in the form of Human Remains-esque jazzy atonality, but unfortunately these early spurts of ingenuity are generally brief [the exception being on the song 'Pseudo', which sounds like an evolved version Human Remains, broken up by an odd ambient segment in the middle.]

It's not until track 9, 'Black Metal Sabbath' that Lucid Interval really comes into its own. This song is a very playful composition that seems to be intended as a parody of both Black Sabbath and the black metal genre [lyrically and musically] but ends up being quite a bit more worthwhile with the first half being primarily high-note tremolo picked [emulating stereotypical Scandinavian black metal riffing] and the second half breaking down into a piece of post-Sabbath sludge rock. Despite being split into halves like this, 'Black Metal Sabbath' still comes off far less disjointed sounding than much of what preceeds it on this album, and sets the tone for the last 4 songs on the album ['Cannabism' is a very short and very strange, folksy acoustic piece], which exhibit influences from an eclectic mix of sources [everything from At the Gates to John Zorn to Brutal Truth to Candlemass] and constantly keeps the listener off-balance, without sounding contrived, and eschewing almost entirely the death metal generica that plagued the early part of the album. The final listed song, 'Arsonist Savior' is especially bizarre - a bombastic casserole of just about every style of non-mainstream music that you could think of [it goes far beyond the handful of influences listed above, covering grindcore, jazz, funk, psychedelica, prog-rock and everything in between], but stranger still is the fact that there's a flow and coherence to this track that one certainly wouldn't expect from something so avantgarde. And then there's that "hidden" track at the tail end of 7 minutes of silence, which is an outright fusion jam session, and a highly enjoyable one at that.

Certainly, it's not fair to lump Cephalic Carnage in with the mediocre field of American death metal and grind bands. The latter part of Lucid Interval features some of the most varied and adventurous music to challenge the extreme metal world this side of Japan's Sigh and Canada's Gorguts. But still, you have to look at the big picture and see that there are times on this album where it sounds like you're listening to just another NYDM band. While this element of the band's sound could be simply a clever ruse to hook fans of that genre, before pulling the rug out from under them with the kind of progressive trickery that pervades the last several tracks, I'd personally prefer it if they'd minimize that aspect of their sound in the future and give us more songs along the lines of 'Black Metal Sabbath', 'Pseudo', 'Arsonist Savior' and 'Lucid Interval'.

In any case, if you like variety in your metal, I recommend at least giving this Cephalic Carnage offering a listen. There will probably be parts that you won't like, but the originality that rears its head about midway through the album is plenty enough to make this band stand out like that guy on the cover of Among the Living. These guys haven't totally got it together yet, but when they do, it'll be something spectacular. It's also worth mentioning that shortly after this album was released, Cephalic Carnage put out a single-song, 19-minute EP titled Halls of Amenti on Willowtip Records, which is an excellent piece of ultra-heavy doom metal and also well worth picking up.

By: Roman Temin