The News Review:

- The voice of alternative rock whatever that is now on audiobook too
- THE SNG REMAINS THE SAME
- The Gauntlet :: Cattle Decapitation – Heavy Metal – News – Cattle…

The voice of alternative rock whatever that is now on audiobook too
Toronto Star – Nov 25, 2007
For the epiphany we take you back to Nov. Alan Cross then a 16-year-old self-styled "music geek from the land of the mullet head" was sitting in Winnipeg’s Playhouse Theatre awaiting Elvis Costello. Cross had bought two tickets but couldn’t persuade anyone from his hometown Stonewall to share a short trip south to hear a nerdy-looking singer who didn’t sound anything like Led Zeppelin. Cross was no authority but had picked up a cassette of Costello’s second album This Year’s Model played it while driving in his Pinto and was intrigued. "The opening act was ( punk band) the Battered Wives" he recalls. "I remember thinking `This is very interesting… He prefers his own terms of reference. "There were two distinct streams of musical evolution. There was stuff (based on) the blues that followed the trajectory of the Beatles the Rolling Stones prog-rock hair metal bands and so on. And then there was the stuff that was rooted in the Nuggets bands of the 1960s the Velvet Underground Iggy Pop and the Stooges MC5 the New York Dolls. It was a parallel rock and roll universe. And that was the one I was mandated to document. "The program deserves credit for bridging generational listening habits gently prodding its audience toward exploration.

THE SNG REMAINS THE SAME
New York Post – Nov 25, 2007
It moves you – to bang your head throw up a salute maybe think deep thoughts. Speaking of which; “The words provide a very open text; they invite endless interpretation" writes Dr. Robert Walser Professor of Musicology Dartmouth College and author of “Running With the Devil: Power Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. "”Yet they are resonant requiring no rigorous study in order to become meaningful. Like the music they engage with the fantasies and anxieties of our time; they offer contact with social and metaphysical depth in a world of commodities and mass communication. ‘Stairway to Heaven' no less than canonized artistic post-modernism addresses ‘decentered subjects' who are striving to find credible experiences of depth and community. "r maybe not unless the credible experiences of depth and community are a heavy metal parking lot.

The Gauntlet :: Cattle Decapitation – Heavy Metal – News – Cattle…
The Gauntlet – Nov 25, 2007
The band seemed a little more at home at Logan Square and with this line-up than they had last time around down in Mokena with Edguy and Into Eternity. Logan Square is a more intimate venue that draws a more youthful audience both of which favor the band’s style and live show. As with the other bands though their set was short and after half an hour they were ushered off the stage by the house music Thin Lizzy’s ‘Jailbreak’. During these earlier bands and in the following layover the crowd continued to grow and by the beginning of the next set around 8:10 (after more sound problems) it had reached a rather respectable size. There was still a wide berth for the mosh pit between the front few rows and the rest of the audience but it proved to be no more than was necessary once Cattle Decapitation took the stage and laid it to waste. Travis Ryan opened the set with an eerie sequence of rasping vocalise drenched in reverb delivered almost tenderly with his eyes closed as the smoke machine pumped out a dense mist. Then without any warning the band erupted into a 30-minute frenzy of gore-soaked grindcore as maniacal as any show I’ve seen… Like the rest of the band he seemed rather quiet and reserved before the set but during each song he was uninhibited and completely unpredictable. When not shrieking indecipherably into the microphone he would flail about the stage like a man in a seizure messily douse himself with water and belch the remainder onto the floor spit into the air and stick out his tongue to catch it again empty his nose farmer-style towards the audience and leap out onto the front row at random. Plenty of metal bands today play with violent abandon but Ryan was truly wild. As for the rest of the band their calm dispassion only served to emphasize Ryan’s performance. Josh Elmore played his guitar with as much fury as Ryan sang but his stage presence was completely opposed. Aside from the blurring speed of his hands he looked uninvolved and expressionless and between songs as Ryan addressed us with sarcastic distaste Elmore would only lay his hand across the neck of his guitar and stare coldly unblinking at the stage in front of him. The rest of the band were similar in this respect and performed very well in their own rights but Elmore and Ryan were the focal points of the band and played off one another to great success.