ANOTHER CHANCE TO GET EVISCERATED BY CANNIBAL CORPSE
Kind of amazingly, I haven’t seen Cannibal Corpse live since they absolutely wrecked the Rockstar Mayhem Fest’s second stage last summer — but I’m dying to do so. That was just a thirty minute set, after all, and you need way more than a half hour to really enjoy the Corpse.
And I’ll get my shot this fall: the band has just announced another headlining trek, this time with Dying Fetus, Vital Remains, and Devourment in tow. Devourment is the only one of those bands I’ve never seen live before, so I can vouch for Dying Fetus and Vital Remains — those bands put on killer shows. What an excellent line-up. If I close my eyes and think about this tour, I can already feel the stench of dude sweat permeating my nostrils.
Dates after el jumperoo.
Originally, I had planned on livetweeting this year’s New England Metal and Hardcore Festival for the purposes of turning my pithy comments into some sort of proper show report. Looking back on some of those 140-characters-or-less entries, I realized that there was really no need to do so. Instead, below you’ll find a selection of my most poignant tweets from the two day weekender. Enjoy!
The old cliché goes that genius is the very simple idea that, for whatever reason, no one has ever had before. Assuming that’s true, then Cannibal Corpse are the Albert Einsteins of metal. For these dudes were not, at the beginning, great musicians. They were just some kids from Buffalo who basically listened to thrash and said “We wanna do that, but make it even heavier and more evil-sounding.” And so they did. And simple though it seems (Tomb of the Mutilated might be considered quaint if it were released today) Cannibal Corpse – particularly the original line-up of vocalist Chris Barnes, bassist Alex Webster, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz, and guitarists Jack Owen and Bob Rusay – are undeniably one of the most influential bands in all of metal history. They are one of the key creators of death metal as we know it. As though he felt the words to Slayer’s “Angel of Death” just weren’t violent enough, Barnes practically invented pure gore as lyrical fodder; he also reinvented his craft (if you can call making it sound like your lungs are having violent diarrhea a “craft”). Producer Scott Burns, who was basically the sixth member of the band for years, obviously deserves his share of the credit for their accomplishments, too. Basically, if you’ve ever enjoyed to pretty much any death metal song ever, you probably owe Cannibal Corpse a handjob.
Deep into a storied career that took him from Cannibal Corpse to Six Feet Under to Torture Killer and back again, everybody knows what to expect out of a new effort from the perpetually blazed Chris Barnes and Six Feet Under. If you don’t know what’s in store from this band after fifteen years, then you should probably turn in your metalhead degree to Vince and Axl. The dudes’ third edition of the Graveyard Classics collection is one of those strange things that’s both familiar, awesome, and kind of ridiculous. Pure curiousity pointed this writer to a copy of the record, and it’s oddly intriguing – the kind of intriguing that’s caused by getting blasted and hearing a sweet (but in reality, not really that rad) cover band rip their version of a Deep Purple song at the bar down the street.
