WATCH THIS REHEARSAL FOOTAGE OF A CHIMAIRA COVER BAND
With all due respect to Mark Hunter — a talented vocalist, extraordinary Tweeter, and Chimaira’s lone original member — this footage of three new[ish] members of Chimaira rehearsing together is about as exciting as this story’s headline makes it sound. While some would say this is “rehearsal” footage, it’d probably be a lot more accurate to call it “learning” footage. It looks like Daath’s Emil Werstler — Chimaira’s senior-most member with a 10-month silver coin – is running the show here and teaching the two new guys how to play Chimaira songs. These guys are all talented musicians and I’m sure the finished product will sound great, but at what point in the mass exodus of members does a band stop being that band? Watching a bunch of men in different bands learn songs so they can go up on stage and pretend to be some other band is just weird! On the other hand, if some kid who knows nothing of all the member swaps goes to a show and loves it, does it even matter? Does life even matter?? Aren’t we all gonna die eventually anyway?!?!?
Maybe Hunter is trying to go the Chris Barnes route; shit, Barnes has been doing it for years and Six Feet Under are still going strong… so I guess fans really don’t care. Speaking of Six Feet Under, former members of Chimaira just wrapped up their Six Feet Under cover band recording sessions and are currently in the mixing process! Now the former members of Six Feet Under just need to join up with Eyal Levi in a reconsituted version of Daath and this three-band circle jerk will be complete.
-VN
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.
