Arson Cafe: Decapitated - Cancer Culture Review

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Decapitated - Cancer Culture Review

It’s now been 20 years since Nihility, Decapitated’s second and highly influential album in the modern / technical death metal scene. They have gone a long way since then and even after all this time, I can not account the band for any serious misstep in their discography, as they have more or less maintained their posture these two decades. Latest offering Cancer Culture is an alteration of the common term “cancel culture” that has been in the spotlight the last few years, and Decapitated take a stand regarding it with an opinion that is easy to guess from the album’s title already. Compositional prowess has always been there, the band is more than capable in creating continuous streams of intense and heavy guitar riffing, yet Cancer Culture has, in my opinion, the most dreadful and lousiest lyrics they have ever written. Since such a hot topic was picked, it would have been more convincing if it was articulated more consistently and not as if Decapitated are teenagers themselves (just five years ago in Anticult, the band nailed it on the lyrical content). Some tracks are great musically, like the self-titled, “Locked” (a highlight!) or “Suicide Space Program” and “Last Supper”. And then, on the two tracks where guest musicians are featured, there isn’t a riff that was written that was not generic, especially in “Iconoclast” (with Robb Flynn of Machine Head). “Hello Death”, with Jinjer’s Tatiana, is by far the weakest piece in Cancer Culture for the same reasons, as it barely even has an actual riff. Decapitated is a band I have been following for years now, and for the first time I’d rather not understand what they’re singing about, because while the concept itself could prove interesting, the delivery here is embarrassing. At the same time, it’s not short of musical excellence in some parts of the record, and almost toothless at others (further example, “Hours as Battlegrounds” shouldn’t even be there). Cancer Culture has a great cover, but I wish a lot of its insides would be different. [2.5/5 - Average]

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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.