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What more can be said, in this Year Of The Corpse 2009, that hasn’t already been whispered, grunted or screamed about the almighty Cannibal? They’ve smashed—nay, hammer smashed—every boundary set before them, defied every censor set upon them, and besmirched every country that would have them. After two decades of unending death metal torment, the band’s calling cards are many: the depraved lyrics, the blinding technical prowess, the dominating stage presence, the legions of dedicated fans, the million and a half albums sold. From their bloody Caesarian inception in 1988 and debut splatterfest Eaten Back To Life (1990), Cannibal Corpse have mangled the minds and stereo systems of death metal youth from Buffalo to Sydney to Tokyo to Tampa while playing a crucial role in inspiring a new wave of musicians like the Black Dahlia Murder and Cattle Decapitation.
In the far-flung death metal universe, the name Cannibal Corpse has achieved godfather status—not only for the band’s morbid musical legacy but because of their commitment to the scene as a whole. “Part of the reason we may have ended up in a leadership position in the scene is because we’ve been consistent,” bassist Alex Webster offers. “We’ve tried to stay 100% death metal in the kind of music we make, and we’ve always tried to take younger death metal bands on tour to help give back to the scene we’ve been so lucky with. So if we’ve become godfathers of death metal in any way, it’s because we care about the scene, and we’ve been consistently caring about it for our entire career.”
Indeed, the list of crucial Corpse slabs rolls off the tongue like something mangled and abscessed, but still vicious: 1992’s Tomb Of The Mutilated, 1994’s The Bleeding, 1996’s Vile—the album that marked the band’s new era under the gruesome vocal reign of George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher—1998’s Gallery Of Suicide and 2006’s brutally effective Kill. The band’s mainstream breaches over those years are well-documented: the infamous appearance in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; a cameo in the World Of Warcraft computer games (the series recently introduced a character named “Gorge the Corpsegrinder”); a sadistic live performance at the birthday party of Elijah Blue, the musical progeny of Gregg Allman and Cher. In recent years, Cannibal’s influence has spawned new levels of genuflection from underground acts like Cannabis Corpse, who bow in deference to the masters—and the leaf—with albums entitled Blunted At Birth and Tube Of The Resinated. There are even a couple of dudes in Detroit who call themselves Acoustic Corpse and do unplugged versions of Cannibal classics like “Fucked With A Knife,” “Dismembered And Molested” and “I Cum Blood.”
The band themselves, however, just keep on killing. Having hacked and flayed their way through hordes of flesh-eating carcass fuckers, blood-slicked suicide galleries and compulsive disembowelers, the mighty Corpse have seen fit to expand their killing field for a bit of the old mass extermination. Witness their eleventh studio album, Evisceration Plague, wherein the band mushroom-clouds their own homicidal visions to pandemic proportions. Deep, festering cuts like “Scalding Hail,” “Carnivorous Swarm” and the title track see an ossified populous summarily decimated by wholly unnatural disasters conceived in the unkempt minds of co-lyricists and original members Webster and Paul Mazurkiewicz (drums). “We wanted death on an epic scale, as opposed to the individual, murderer-stalking-his-prey stuff we’ve done in the past—although the album still has a few of those songs,” Webster explains with a laugh. “It’s not War And Peace or anything—it’s a gore story—but the body count is higher than ever before.”
Aided and abetted by guitarists Rob Barrett and Pat O’Brien—not to mention the unmistakable throat of Mr. Fisher—Webster and Mazurkiewicz dismembered and reassembled their latest monstrosity at Mana Recording Studios in St. Petersburg, Florida, under the expert eye of Hate Eternal mastermind Erik Rutan. “I think it’s the tightest and most musically competent record we’ve ever done,” Webster says. “Not that the other ones weren’t competent, but it would be hard to find flaw with the execution of this one—the performances are rock solid. Musically, the goal was to make cool, catchy songs that are just as brutal and heavy as any of the older, more obscure stuff we’ve done. Our mission is to be a brutal death metal band, and if we get there by writing a technical song or a catchy groove song, that’s fine, as long as it’s brutal death metal at the end of the day.”
