Kataklysm - Waiting for the End to Come

Holy balls, have we not talked about Kataklysm? How have we not talked about Kataklysm? Somehow I feel this could only be your fault.

On the 25th of October, in the 2013th year of our lord and flavour, Cheesy Crust, the aforementioned Montreal metalloids dropped their eleventh studio album Waiting for the End to Come, a steaming pile of awesome, right in our collective laps. It is heavy and rad and have I shown my hand too early? Well damn, I guess I have to deliberately waste your time until I find a way to wrap this up. If you're that impatient you might as well save us both the trouble of going through this tirade and just get your ass out and buy this album.

Whatever it is that people who make melodic death metal do (I somehow imagine it involves rusty meat and a defibrillator), Kataklysm have done it damn proper. Mind you, I by no means renege on all the tongue-bathing I've given Dissension over the past year, they're still awesome and I will continue to thoroughly embarrass myself at their all too-infrequent shows. They've got a symphonic thrashy air mixed in there, and this review would be about them if I didn't think I've already chaffed my knees enough on their account. Kataklysm has more of a Fear Factorish situation going on, though. That normally wouldn't be a compliment in my books, because I've never been a Fear Factory fan, but I am a fan of what I'm hearing from our boys on this one.

Like any other relatively self-aware metallurgist, I have wrestled the beast known as "It All Sounds the Same". Let's call him Geoffrey. Sometimes someone unleashes Geoffrey on something near and dear to you, and you fight the f***er off tooth and nail. Sometimes the tables turn and you are the aggressor. Sometimes you are the unwilling custodian of Geoffrey, and as you feel the oppressive weight of his shadow and the curdling reek of his breath upon your nape, you know that he knows that you've crumbled. As an honest and avid consumer of black and thrash metal, I sometimes wonder if Geoffrey is the goal. In this particular instance, however, Geoffrey can go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut, and that's just the way I like it.

I'm not going to say Kataklysm have broken any ground with this record; I'm not going to suggest that you probably can't find a thousand other albums just like this one. It's straightforward melodic f***ing death metal, I might as well say it's chocolate ice cream, you already know what to expect.

I will, however, tell you that it is the best dang chocolate ice cream I've put in my ears in quite some time.

Rating: Arbitrary number of thumbs up.