This year`s most brutal assaults all seem to come from America: Watchmaker, Converge, and now Cephalic Carnage. Of these three, Cephalic is the oldest, dating from back in 1992, and also the most extreme one musically. Picking elements from many different styles, _Lucid Interval_ combines grindcore with gore, death, doom, rock and hardcore, as well as some electronics, creating a whirlwind of an album that is quite incomparable to any other band. The four different vocal styles (gore, grunt, hardcore and screams) are daring, even though I think certain songs would be better without the gore style singing; the drumming and guitars come out excellently in the mix, creating a driving destructive force. The many ways of destruction are exemplified by "Anthro Emesis", a very slow and doomy song with mixed-in electronics.

"Pseudo" is a chaotic Coalescish piece, while on "Black Metal Sabbath" the black style is performed with both ease and grandeur. "Cannibism" is an acoustic, fucked up, Spanish intermezzo before "Lucid Interval" which is old school thrash. Cephalic Carnage manages to mix it all without forcing it and without making a chaotic mess. Within the whirlwind of battering assaults, structure can be found underneath; making this album a highly recommended listen. Now if they would use more grown-up lyrics, they would have gotten half a point extra - for now, they’ll have to stick with nine out of ten.