241297130 Cannibal Corpse Best Of - Free download as PDF File (.pdf) or read online for free. Pablo and Tina have complicated sexual lives. Pablo writes and directs plays and films; he's gay. New York's guide to theater, restaurants, bars, movies, shopping, fashion, events, activities, things to do, music, art, books, clubs, tours, dance & nightlife. Kirsten Dunst had the best response after she was asked to lose weight for her latest role.
I begin, once again, by stating the obvious: Cannibal Corpse arguably invented death metal as we know it. They helped to put the 'deathrash' era behind and turn death metal into this wild, chaotic, blastbeat-punctuated music that we're all familiar with. As one of the pioneers, and one of the first bands to allow the death metal genre to find mainstream success, they were quite outstanding and influential in their field. Emphasis on 'influential' here. Every now and then there's that band that creates a signature sound that becomes endlessly imitated, because lesser bands want to ride on the coat-tails of that bigger band's fame. Most of the time, this situation creates a flood of 'underground sludge' bands who take too much influences from their idols and don't bother to create a unique sound. Cases like these have resulted in some awful music scenes being formed (see Rings of Saturn and their peers). Cannibal Corpse is no exception when it comes to this phenomenon. Ultimately, and unfortunately, death metal would have to pay the price for having Cannibal Corpse at its front.
We saw the beginnings of the 'new' Cannibal Corpse on 'Gallery of Suicide', and 'Bloodthirst' really brings those elements into focus. I like to blame two people in particular for the downfall of Cannibal Corpse: Pat O'Brien and George Fisher. (I refuse to refer to him by his horribly cringy, trying-oh-so-hard-to-be-edgy nickname.) Before Pat came along, guitars were left to the talents of Jack Owen and Bob Rusay (and later, Rob Barrett). Both were limited somewhat as far as technical skill goes, which resulted in both of them writing riffs that weren't over-the-top technical. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Think of all the great catchy riffs that Owen and Rusay came up with: the doom-like intros of 'Born in a Casket' and 'Covered with Sores', the infamous staccato opening for 'Hammer Smashed Face', the memorable four-note wonder that was 'I Cum Blood'... Every Corpse fan will remember those songs well. They grabbed you by the balls when you first heard them and they made you remember them. After O'Brien joined and brought his superior guitar skills with him, he started writing more technical riffs (and lowering the tuning to drop B and below). As a result of these technical riffs that were harder to listen to, Corpse's songs became less memorable. I ask you: can you remember listening to any Cannibal Corpse song from any album past 'Vile' for the first time and that riff just got wedged into your head? (Don't say Make Them Suffer.) Were there ANY riffs AT ALL from those subsequent albums that were truly catchy in the way that stuff from the Barnes era was? Heh. I thought not. That's because O'Brien's riffs aren't about being catchy. They're about showing off technical skill. They don't stick in your head. Riffs from the Barnes era were pounded into your skull with a sledgehammer and the dent stayed there. With O'Brien's riffs, it's more like you still got smashed with the sledgehammer, but it didn't hurt at all. Of course the riffs are like that on this album. Too technical, not catchy enough, and - to top it off - the drop A tuning and the horrible, but very influential mids-cranked guitar tone sometimes make it hard to even tell what notes the guitars are playing. It's all just vague chugging that feels very forced. I really wish I could give you some musical examples of what I'm talking about, but that's just it. I can't. Every single guitar part goes in one ear and out the other. You'd have to listen to the songs a hundred times before you finally could tell a song from this album by its riff.
So, of course, all the lesser death metal bands had to jump on the bandwagon. They started playing technical, unmemorable riffs and downtuning entirely too much as well, without realizing that you don't have to be in drop A to be 'brutal'. So much did the downtuning aspect influence death metal as a whole, that downtuned, un-catchy guitars were written into the dictionary definition of death metal. How do you like that? Now, bands have to play the downtuned riffs that aren't memorable, or else they'll risk being not considered death metal by 'dictionary'.
George 'Insert immature edgy name here' Fisher, like I've mentioned before, is the other thing that brought Cannibal Corpse down. The tone of his vocals is the major problem here. On this album, you can hear it very clearly. At the start of the song, he'll sound decent, but then, towards the end, his voice will gradually develop more of a whiny overtone, and it'll sound like he's crying very loudly instead of growling. Sometimes it's like this the whole way through the song. And then, of course, there are his high screams. Words cannot even begin to describe how abhorrent to the human ear Fisher's high screams are. They're even worse than Chris Barnes' pig squeals. It sort of sounds like he's crying in a low register when he growls; when he screams, it sounds like he's just crying. People would make the argument that this style of vocals sounds more aggressive than Barnes' style, but the aggressiveness is traded for quality of vocal tone along the way. The thing is, you see, Fisher's more aggressive cry-baby style of death metal vocals is easier to master than Chris Barnes' vomit-inducing grunts (which sounded much better). As such, death metal vocalists all over, who had been wondering how Barnes got his vocals to be that deep and sickening, suddenly heard Fisher, and they were like, 'Aw, man! Their new vocalist sounds as shitty as I do! Well, if the masters of death metal are okay with it, then so am I!' Thus a whole breed of death metal vocalists that sound the same was born.
Lyrical efforts on this album pale in comparison to stuff like 'Tomb of the Mutilated' (Corpse's best lyrical effort, IMO). When Chris Barnes left, he took his then-fading lyrical abilities with him. Writing duties now fell to other members of the band, and they were incompetent at it. When you read this album's lyrics, it's like they did the same thing with them as they did with the guitars. They made the lyrics more technical, to fit Fisher's style and speed. It sounds more like semi-morbid poetry than death metal lyrics.
'I want to be one with the dead
Collection of dead humans, dead
I want to be one with the dead
Collection of dead humans, dead
I want to be one of them'
From 'Dead Human Collection'. At first glance of the title, what is the song about? Someone who kills people and collects their bodies for fun. It's what Barnes would have written about. But what's the song actually about? It's actually about someone who wants to die and join his fellow cadavers in the 'dead human collection'. How brutal is that? Not very. Sounds more like emo than death metal.
'A beast in the wild with nocturnal dementia
Unearthly revival of clandestine extinction
Reborn creature, malicious being
Resurgence of a gruesome species
With carnal obsession, it lusts copulation
Scent of fresh human blood invades its dominion'
From 'Raped by the Beast'. The title sounds promising, yes, but are the lyrics promising? NO! Nothing about necrophilia, fucking the remains of the mother, etc.! It seems like they wrote some kind of childish story about a big shaggy dog that violates you, and then used the thesaurus to add some 'poetic value' to it. It didn't work. I've heard post-hardcore songs with lyrics that are more shocking and brutal than the lyrics from this album. I'm dead serious. Speaking of shocking, guess what? There is a total of TWO uses of profanity in this ENTIRE ALBUM'S LYRICS!! Politically correct lyrics are not for death metal; what more need I say?
Oh yeah. One more thing about the lyrics. Fisher and everyone else seem to think that, since O'Brien's guitar parts aren't catchy, they can compensate by adding a catchy vocal part. I'll just say this: Incorporating some screamed form of the song title in for a hook is not a good way to make your songs catchy. However, it's the formula that Corpse has adopted, and it doesn't look like they'll be dropping it.
The song structures did the opposite of the riffs post-Barnes. No more surprising, chaotic tempo changes (or even time signature changes). Songs from this album rely extensively on blast beats and thrash beats. I'm sure I can't be the only one who thinks that blast beats get really annoying after you've heard more than sixteen bars of them. It doesn't sound inventive anymore. The blast beat is to drums what a diminished scale sweep is to guitars: something not too hard to play that you can pull out on the fly to make it sound like you have more skill than you actually do. This over-use of blast/thrash beats would be a major influence on later death metal bands, and be yet another thing that was written into the dictionary definition of death metal. So, now what happens when someone starts a death metal band and reads the dictionary definition? Downtuned guitars and blast beats? All right, no problem! I was that person once. The first death metal song I wrote was at least 80 percent blast beat (because I read the dictionary definition). Blast beats are not necessary for something to be considered 'death metal'. Look at the song 'NecroPedoPhile' off Tomb of the Mutilated. That song doesn't have a single blast beat in it, and it's still death metal. I think there's only one song on this entire album that has no blast beats: 'Unleashing the Bloodthirsty'. Who knows. There might be more, but it's like I said. Each song goes in the ear and out the other.
Another thing: I have to comment on Paul Mazurkiewicz's shortcomings as a drummer. They've been there from the beginning, and they're always there, even when he's playing a steady groove. It especially shows when he's doing the Kreator death/thrash beat (quarter-note snare and kick, quarter-note triplet power hand). It almost seems like he's slowing down the more he does it. More than a few of his fills are sloppy too. I'm not sure if drum triggering technology was evolved enough in 1999 to convert a human's playing to recorded MIDI and then correct timing errors by replacement with a virtual instrument. It definitely was by 2006, though. Paul's sloppiness can be somewhat excused when his drums sound raw, but when they're overproduced, all his mistakes are magnified. The drums are produced professionally; shouldn't they be played professionally? Granted, his timing errors here aren't as severe as earlier efforts or live performances.
This brings me to my favorite part of every review: production discussion. I've mentioned the guitar tone already, but everything else about the production style would go on to be endlessly imitated, too. Perhaps the loss of Scott Burns is another thing that contributed to the downfall of Cannibal Corpse. He produced every album of theirs as raw as possible (remember the toy drums on 'The Bleeding'?), and it really added to the music. It sounded authentic. The production on this album has been sterilized ten times over. Guitars full of mids, drums that have been compressed down to a click, and an inaudible bass. Well, mostly inaudible. Webster is not the kind of bassist to let someone mix him out. His choice of tones here, though, is the thing that makes him inaudible. At the beginning of 'Coffinfeeder', you can hear his tone for real, and it's lacking in mids. The guitars are full of mids, which basically leaves just the sub frequencies of the bass to be audible. If that's the way it's going to be, why don't you just replace the bass with a sine wave and be done with it? The only time you can hear Webster here is when he doesn't twin the guitars. What about this sounds familiar? Most of it, right? None of it sounds raw. It sounds overproduced; too machine-like. It all sounds overproduced now. And why? What about recording technology has changed that much to where we cannot produce a sound anymore that sounds overproduced? I suppose that, just because producers can make it sound like this, they do. Probably at the request of the band, who handed the producer the Bloodthirst CD and said, 'Produce this sound for us. We want to sound like our idols.'
It really is sad to reflect on Cannibal Corpse and see how they created death metal as we knew it, only to kill it. While Chris Barnes and his rapidly dying voice wasted away in Six Feet Under, Cannibal Corpse became a prototype for all those underground death metal bands who pump out music that's not exciting or catchy. It just exists as music. It serves no purpose other than to present an opportunity for the musicians to practice their instruments. No effort is put into memorable songwriting, bringing back the cramped Scott Burns style of production, or anything else that made early 90s death metal interesting. This album marked the point of no return for death metal and Cannibal Corpse. It is a tiresome collection of sterile songs that don't stand out from one another and make little effort to do so. Again, I say that it is sad that the biggest band in this area of music is the very same band that ruined it with their own shift in musical direction.
I guarantee that if you played a modern Cannibal Corpse song for someone who had never heard of them or heard their music, and then played them a song by a random underground death metal band, they would not be able to tell the difference between the two.
FeaturesWe saw the beginnings of the 'new' Cannibal Corpse on 'Gallery of Suicide', and 'Bloodthirst' really brings those elements into focus. I like to blame two people in particular for the downfall of Cannibal Corpse: Pat O'Brien and George Fisher. (I refuse to refer to him by his horribly cringy, trying-oh-so-hard-to-be-edgy nickname.) Before Pat came along, guitars were left to the talents of Jack Owen and Bob Rusay (and later, Rob Barrett). Both were limited somewhat as far as technical skill goes, which resulted in both of them writing riffs that weren't over-the-top technical. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Think of all the great catchy riffs that Owen and Rusay came up with: the doom-like intros of 'Born in a Casket' and 'Covered with Sores', the infamous staccato opening for 'Hammer Smashed Face', the memorable four-note wonder that was 'I Cum Blood'... Every Corpse fan will remember those songs well. They grabbed you by the balls when you first heard them and they made you remember them. After O'Brien joined and brought his superior guitar skills with him, he started writing more technical riffs (and lowering the tuning to drop B and below). As a result of these technical riffs that were harder to listen to, Corpse's songs became less memorable. I ask you: can you remember listening to any Cannibal Corpse song from any album past 'Vile' for the first time and that riff just got wedged into your head? (Don't say Make Them Suffer.) Were there ANY riffs AT ALL from those subsequent albums that were truly catchy in the way that stuff from the Barnes era was? Heh. I thought not. That's because O'Brien's riffs aren't about being catchy. They're about showing off technical skill. They don't stick in your head. Riffs from the Barnes era were pounded into your skull with a sledgehammer and the dent stayed there. With O'Brien's riffs, it's more like you still got smashed with the sledgehammer, but it didn't hurt at all. Of course the riffs are like that on this album. Too technical, not catchy enough, and - to top it off - the drop A tuning and the horrible, but very influential mids-cranked guitar tone sometimes make it hard to even tell what notes the guitars are playing. It's all just vague chugging that feels very forced. I really wish I could give you some musical examples of what I'm talking about, but that's just it. I can't. Every single guitar part goes in one ear and out the other. You'd have to listen to the songs a hundred times before you finally could tell a song from this album by its riff.
So, of course, all the lesser death metal bands had to jump on the bandwagon. They started playing technical, unmemorable riffs and downtuning entirely too much as well, without realizing that you don't have to be in drop A to be 'brutal'. So much did the downtuning aspect influence death metal as a whole, that downtuned, un-catchy guitars were written into the dictionary definition of death metal. How do you like that? Now, bands have to play the downtuned riffs that aren't memorable, or else they'll risk being not considered death metal by 'dictionary'.
George 'Insert immature edgy name here' Fisher, like I've mentioned before, is the other thing that brought Cannibal Corpse down. The tone of his vocals is the major problem here. On this album, you can hear it very clearly. At the start of the song, he'll sound decent, but then, towards the end, his voice will gradually develop more of a whiny overtone, and it'll sound like he's crying very loudly instead of growling. Sometimes it's like this the whole way through the song. And then, of course, there are his high screams. Words cannot even begin to describe how abhorrent to the human ear Fisher's high screams are. They're even worse than Chris Barnes' pig squeals. It sort of sounds like he's crying in a low register when he growls; when he screams, it sounds like he's just crying. People would make the argument that this style of vocals sounds more aggressive than Barnes' style, but the aggressiveness is traded for quality of vocal tone along the way. The thing is, you see, Fisher's more aggressive cry-baby style of death metal vocals is easier to master than Chris Barnes' vomit-inducing grunts (which sounded much better). As such, death metal vocalists all over, who had been wondering how Barnes got his vocals to be that deep and sickening, suddenly heard Fisher, and they were like, 'Aw, man! Their new vocalist sounds as shitty as I do! Well, if the masters of death metal are okay with it, then so am I!' Thus a whole breed of death metal vocalists that sound the same was born.
Lyrical efforts on this album pale in comparison to stuff like 'Tomb of the Mutilated' (Corpse's best lyrical effort, IMO). When Chris Barnes left, he took his then-fading lyrical abilities with him. Writing duties now fell to other members of the band, and they were incompetent at it. When you read this album's lyrics, it's like they did the same thing with them as they did with the guitars. They made the lyrics more technical, to fit Fisher's style and speed. It sounds more like semi-morbid poetry than death metal lyrics.
'I want to be one with the dead
Collection of dead humans, dead
I want to be one with the dead
Collection of dead humans, dead
I want to be one of them'
From 'Dead Human Collection'. At first glance of the title, what is the song about? Someone who kills people and collects their bodies for fun. It's what Barnes would have written about. But what's the song actually about? It's actually about someone who wants to die and join his fellow cadavers in the 'dead human collection'. How brutal is that? Not very. Sounds more like emo than death metal.
'A beast in the wild with nocturnal dementia
Unearthly revival of clandestine extinction
Reborn creature, malicious being
Resurgence of a gruesome species
With carnal obsession, it lusts copulation
Scent of fresh human blood invades its dominion'
From 'Raped by the Beast'. The title sounds promising, yes, but are the lyrics promising? NO! Nothing about necrophilia, fucking the remains of the mother, etc.! It seems like they wrote some kind of childish story about a big shaggy dog that violates you, and then used the thesaurus to add some 'poetic value' to it. It didn't work. I've heard post-hardcore songs with lyrics that are more shocking and brutal than the lyrics from this album. I'm dead serious. Speaking of shocking, guess what? There is a total of TWO uses of profanity in this ENTIRE ALBUM'S LYRICS!! Politically correct lyrics are not for death metal; what more need I say?
Oh yeah. One more thing about the lyrics. Fisher and everyone else seem to think that, since O'Brien's guitar parts aren't catchy, they can compensate by adding a catchy vocal part. I'll just say this: Incorporating some screamed form of the song title in for a hook is not a good way to make your songs catchy. However, it's the formula that Corpse has adopted, and it doesn't look like they'll be dropping it.
The song structures did the opposite of the riffs post-Barnes. No more surprising, chaotic tempo changes (or even time signature changes). Songs from this album rely extensively on blast beats and thrash beats. I'm sure I can't be the only one who thinks that blast beats get really annoying after you've heard more than sixteen bars of them. It doesn't sound inventive anymore. The blast beat is to drums what a diminished scale sweep is to guitars: something not too hard to play that you can pull out on the fly to make it sound like you have more skill than you actually do. This over-use of blast/thrash beats would be a major influence on later death metal bands, and be yet another thing that was written into the dictionary definition of death metal. So, now what happens when someone starts a death metal band and reads the dictionary definition? Downtuned guitars and blast beats? All right, no problem! I was that person once. The first death metal song I wrote was at least 80 percent blast beat (because I read the dictionary definition). Blast beats are not necessary for something to be considered 'death metal'. Look at the song 'NecroPedoPhile' off Tomb of the Mutilated. That song doesn't have a single blast beat in it, and it's still death metal. I think there's only one song on this entire album that has no blast beats: 'Unleashing the Bloodthirsty'. Who knows. There might be more, but it's like I said. Each song goes in the ear and out the other.
Another thing: I have to comment on Paul Mazurkiewicz's shortcomings as a drummer. They've been there from the beginning, and they're always there, even when he's playing a steady groove. It especially shows when he's doing the Kreator death/thrash beat (quarter-note snare and kick, quarter-note triplet power hand). It almost seems like he's slowing down the more he does it. More than a few of his fills are sloppy too. I'm not sure if drum triggering technology was evolved enough in 1999 to convert a human's playing to recorded MIDI and then correct timing errors by replacement with a virtual instrument. It definitely was by 2006, though. Paul's sloppiness can be somewhat excused when his drums sound raw, but when they're overproduced, all his mistakes are magnified. The drums are produced professionally; shouldn't they be played professionally? Granted, his timing errors here aren't as severe as earlier efforts or live performances.
This brings me to my favorite part of every review: production discussion. I've mentioned the guitar tone already, but everything else about the production style would go on to be endlessly imitated, too. Perhaps the loss of Scott Burns is another thing that contributed to the downfall of Cannibal Corpse. He produced every album of theirs as raw as possible (remember the toy drums on 'The Bleeding'?), and it really added to the music. It sounded authentic. The production on this album has been sterilized ten times over. Guitars full of mids, drums that have been compressed down to a click, and an inaudible bass. Well, mostly inaudible. Webster is not the kind of bassist to let someone mix him out. His choice of tones here, though, is the thing that makes him inaudible. At the beginning of 'Coffinfeeder', you can hear his tone for real, and it's lacking in mids. The guitars are full of mids, which basically leaves just the sub frequencies of the bass to be audible. If that's the way it's going to be, why don't you just replace the bass with a sine wave and be done with it? The only time you can hear Webster here is when he doesn't twin the guitars. What about this sounds familiar? Most of it, right? None of it sounds raw. It sounds overproduced; too machine-like. It all sounds overproduced now. And why? What about recording technology has changed that much to where we cannot produce a sound anymore that sounds overproduced? I suppose that, just because producers can make it sound like this, they do. Probably at the request of the band, who handed the producer the Bloodthirst CD and said, 'Produce this sound for us. We want to sound like our idols.'
It really is sad to reflect on Cannibal Corpse and see how they created death metal as we knew it, only to kill it. While Chris Barnes and his rapidly dying voice wasted away in Six Feet Under, Cannibal Corpse became a prototype for all those underground death metal bands who pump out music that's not exciting or catchy. It just exists as music. It serves no purpose other than to present an opportunity for the musicians to practice their instruments. No effort is put into memorable songwriting, bringing back the cramped Scott Burns style of production, or anything else that made early 90s death metal interesting. This album marked the point of no return for death metal and Cannibal Corpse. It is a tiresome collection of sterile songs that don't stand out from one another and make little effort to do so. Again, I say that it is sad that the biggest band in this area of music is the very same band that ruined it with their own shift in musical direction.
I guarantee that if you played a modern Cannibal Corpse song for someone who had never heard of them or heard their music, and then played them a song by a random underground death metal band, they would not be able to tell the difference between the two.
On the 13th anniversary of the release of Kill, we rank Cannibal Corpse’s bloody musical rampage in its entirety.
When one thinks of death metal, the band their mind immediately conjures is Cannibal Corpse. With their undeniably punishing sound, their offensively violent subject matter and album art (the latter courtesy of the inimitable Vincent Locke), and their complete dedication to playing straightforward brutal death metal, the Tampa-cum-Buffalo quintet have easily become the genre’s most identifiable act. But true fans know that more than anything, Cannibal Corpse are backed up by their incredible body of work, with fourteen studios releases cataloging a musical progression that has somehow never strayed from the path of sonic mass murder.
Staring down the Cannibal Corpse discography is as intimidating as facing off against a towering masked man with a meat cleaver in his hand and a tent in his pants. But while there are really no bad Cannibal albums, one must admit that some of their records are superior to others. So in honor of the 13th anniversary of the band’s mind-blowing 2006 album Kill, we decided to rank the band’s full-lengths in order of greatness, if only to see which body ends up at top of the pile.
Let the slaughter begin…
14. The Wretched Spawn (2004)
The Wretched Spawn has some killer tracks on it, and Decency Defiled is as close to a straight-up radio single as Cannibal Corpse will ever write. But the production seems oddly smooth and quiet for the band, especially the drums, which don’t pop and throttle the way they should for brutal death metal. The cover, too, lacks direction, seemingly calling back previous albums like Butchered At Birth and Bloodthirst, but never honing in on a specific theme. Not a bad album by any means, but sometimes gross and pissed-off simply aren’t enough.
Though it contains one of the best Cannibal Corpse singalong lyrics of all time — “FIREUPTHECHAINSAW! HACKTHEIRFUCKINGHEADSOFF!” — A Skeletal Domain feels oddly dettached from Cannibal Corpse’s catalog. Maybe it’s the “dry” cover, which focuses on skeletons rather than the band’s traditional dripping gore and fleshy zombies. Or maybe it’s the production shift from Erik Rutan to Mark Lewis, who gave the album a more traditionally “metal” sound. Either way, A Skeletal Domain, while certainly killer, doesn’t slay quite as much as the other albums on Corpse catalog.
The turn of the millennium saw Cannibal Corpse becoming less of a musical novelty and more of a weathered subterranean act. Ace Ventura was officially in the past, George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher had settled into the band, and more progressive death metal fans were quick to cite how Cannibal just “did the same thing on every album.” As such, 1999’s Bloodthirst is rad in parts but feels a little aimless overall, and lacks the strange, creeping nuance that other Corpse albums are bursting with. That said, this release helped entrench the band in the hard-working underground, proving that they were more than just something to gross out your buddies with.
Coming off of 2006’s Kill, Cannibal Corpse had reestablished themselves as a band to be reckoned with, and charged forward into Evisceration Plague. Strangely enough, though Erik Rutan returned to produce the album, it feels distinctly less furious than its predecessor, and Vincent Locke’s questionable choices for the cover art make it a slightly confusing addition to the band’s overwhelming roster. At the same time, the left turns the band takes on Evisceration are admirable, and the album’s title track is a perfect bludgeoner that will forever remain a highlight of the Cannibal live set.
What makes 2012’s Torture stand out from other latter-day Cannibal Corpse albums is its stomp. While the faster songs on the album are solid enough, it’s the pneumatic punishment of As Deep As the Knife Will Go and the un-fucking-beatable chug of Scourge Of Iron that will forever keep it relevant in the ears of death metal’s fans. Also worth examining is how it sees the band getting thematically acrobatic, with songs like Intestinal Crank and Followed Home Then Killed going down weird, eerie roads (though they always end in a dead body). There are only so many fast tracks about getting stabbed that one band can write before they need to branch out.
The first Cannibal Corpse album to feature Corpsegrinder on vocals, Vile’s a weird one — and that’s to its credit. Though the band’s sound had beguns to enter the horrific, kinetic tone that it would champion from here on, on Vile it retains some of the insulated basement-track production of Cannibal’s early releases. The mixture of fast-paced numbers like Mummified In Barbed Wire and uncommonly slow tracks like Bloodlands confused some fans, but shows the band taking awesome risks that would pay off in their evolution. And then, there’s the cover, arguably Vincent Locke’s masterpiece and perhaps the greatest example of an album’s art matching its title.
To have their newest album so far down this career-spanning list speaks to what a well-oiled machine Cannibal Corpse has become. Though in certain ways unorthodox, Cannibal’s 14th album is a delicious goddamn maelstrom, and opens with a near perfect one-two-three punch — Only One Will Die, the juggernaut of a title track, and the strange, brooding Code Of The Slashers. On top of that, Erik Rutan’s perfected production style and Vincent Locke’s first victim’s-eye-view album cover sees the most violent band on earth only getting more brutal with age. Indisputable proof that the blade has never been dulled.
It might be hard clearly to hear over the groaning of purists seeing Cannibal Corpse’s debut this far up the list, but actually listen to Eaten Back To Life and you’ll hear an incredible old-school death metal record by a killer band…who just aren’t there yet. No shame in that — they were kids when this one came out! As far as death metal debuts go, Eaten is an incredible record, full of wily guitars and Chris Barnes’ patented hoarse growl, and for fans of that classic Scott Burns sound, this record can’t be beat. But in the long line-up of Cannibal Corpse’s discography, Eaten is more about how much promise you can hear on it than it is about death metal mastery.
There’s a good reason 2002’s Gore Obsessed is criminally underrated: it wasn’t on anyone’s radar. In 2002, everyone was drooling over Killswitch Engage and Soilwork, hoping to recover from nu-metal’s macho simplicity with progression and emotional gravitas. And Cannibal Corpse, death metal’s most reliable band? They were writing one of their most grinding, technical, misanthropic albums of their career, and adorning it with one of the most utterly insane covers of all time (a cape of faces, people). Not many surface-level listeners will know this studio release very well, but yell, “HAAAATCHEEET” in a room full of diehard fans, and you’ll start a growl-along that’ll bring down the house.
On Corpsegrinder’s second album with the band, Cannibal steadied their footing, updated their production sound, and came out swinging. Gallery Of Suicide sees the band touching on the powerful, hard-hitting sound they’d later champion, but still experimenting with a gnarly, acidic guitar tone that attacks the listener rather than just moves their head up and down. This album comes out of the gate with knife in hand on I Will Kill You, and then swings dramatically from patented death marches like Sentenced To Burn to the jaunty experimental numbers like instrumental From Skin To Liquid, finally closing with the bone-crushing blast of Crushing The Despised. A strange gem buried right in the middle of fourteen gallons of guts.
In many ways, The Bleeding is Cannibal Corpse’s “mainstream” album (as mainstream as dudes who sing about entrails being ripped from cunts get, anyway), in that it probably contains the most songs of any CC album that fans will know offhand. This makes sense — the records came out right after Tomb Of The Mutilated and the band’s infamous appearance in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, so it was written and released at the height of their first wave of renown. Stripped, Raped, And Strangled is in many ways the band’s most accessible song, while Staring Through The Eyes Of The Dead and the title track are live staples. At the same time, it’s hard to argue that this album is anything but pure brutal death metal — the guitar tone on The Bleeding seethes, and if your most presentable album includes a song called Fucked With A Knife on it, it’s pretty obvious you’re not trying to break through on Top 40 radio.
Even if one ignores the timeless, unstoppable assault of opener Hammer Smashed Face, 1992’s Tomb Of The Mutilated is one of Cannibal Corpse’s finest moments. Its production is extremely biting, Barnes’s vocal output is horrifically indecipherable, and its lyrical content is so repugnant that it transcends simple VHS horror and becomes a sort of poetic exercise in overkill (Necropedophile? Are you fucking kidding me?). All of this, paired with Vincent Locke’s bizarrely amorous cover art, officially presented the world in 1992 with an unspeakable concept: what is death metal required creativity? What if Cannibal Corpse — God helps us — were artists?
You would be hard-pressed to find a more perfect modern death metal album than 2006’s Kill. From the band’s urgent guitars, to Erik Rutan’s vibrant production, to Corpsegrinder’s infuriated bark, to the beautifully simple album title, to Vincent Locke’s insanely detailed leering madman art, this one has it all. Tracks like Death Walking Terror, Necrosadistic Warning, and the insane whirlwind of The Time To Kill Is Now somehow reinvented the band while simultaneously never straying from their formula. That it marked a new era of both Cannibal’s musical style and popularity among fans now seems obvious, but at the time no one could’ve guessed that the band would reconquer the throne as mercilessly as they did with Kill. The message on this album is clear: make them suffer, forever.
Just…disgusting. While some bands have a sophomore slump, Cannibal Corpse used their second album to up the ante on everything that made them unique. On Butchered At Birth, the band’s riffs and song structure are bizarre and wonky, their production is simultaneously buried and harsh, and their subject matter trades typical horror fodder for more upsetting, psychologically-loaded imagery and topics. Every track on the album, from the rippling aggression of Meat Hook Sodomy to the homicidal gallop of Innards Decay, is an unorthodox yet deeply satisfying piece of blood-drenched death metal perfection. The cover art and quote from the murderous Gilles De Rais featured in the record’s booklet speak to the band’s total dedication to repulsing anyone who came in contact with them. No words can accurately describe the hideous, gut-ripping power of Butchered At Birth — you just have to experience it yourself, and try not to puke while doing so.
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Posted on March 21st 2019, 6:00pm
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