It's been a few years, and we've missed this band. Sure, Cephalic Carnage has held to a fairly steady formula in its now-eighteen-year career, but oh, what a formula it is: Coupling punishing metal jabs that hit like a fat man swinging a blunt object with breakdowns of insane technical mastery, Denver's favorite death-grind act uses roughly the same ingredients in each LP to mix Molotov cocktails that just keep getting more volatile with every attempt.
It's good news, then, that the band has a new full-length coming up that it's calling Misled by Certainty--a little trademark Cephalic Carnage cleverness if we've ever heard it--to be released Aug. 31.
But really, the word "formula" is misleading itself, because where Cephalic Carnage is concerned, the formula is all its own; perhaps the closest you can come to CC's mix of brutal and avant-garde is Dillinger Escape Plan, and even then, Dillinger tends to be more mathematical. From the death-growl to the crashing guitars, there's no mistaking CC for anything but metal--but the band's trademark is the frenetic course of its songs, which never stay in one place for more than a couple of seconds before they descend to the razor edge of chaos and then congeal back into recognizable riffs.
The band's last record, Xenosapien, was a step in a more experimental direction than its predecessor, 2005's Anomalies, and if Misled by Certainty follows that trajectory, we can't wait. In the meantime, check out the video for "Dying will be the Death of Me" (see what we mean about the cleverness?), the single from Anomalies. But just a disclaimer: We can't be responsible for your blown mind.
