Cannibal Corpse are one of the constants of the metal universe, a perfect example of artistic conservatism as a life path. Their music has remained essentially unchanged since their 1990 debut album, Eaten Back to Life: They play fast, aggressive death metal, but somehow manage to shoehorn just enough melody into their songs to make them memorable beyond a head-down blur of riffs and blast beats. They don’t really have one representative album to recommend to newbies, though everything since 2006’s Kill has been ridiculously impressive....
This was technically a co-headlining tour, so both Cannibal Corpse and Behemoth played for the same amount of time (roughly 50 minutes each), but Cannibal Corpse made substantially more of their relatively limited time onstage. They opened with one of their slowest songs, “Scourge of Iron,” as though warming the crowd up before a workout. And frontman George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher fits the role of coach or drill instructor: He’s an astonishing physical presence, big and bulky, with a neck the size of the average person’s thigh. He pinwheels his hair in precise circles every time the music speeds up, and barks the lyrics out like bullets. Behind him, his bandmates — guitarists Rob Barrett and and Pat O’Brien, bassist Alex Webster, and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz — crank out the riffs, barely paying attention to the crowd at all. I don’t think I saw Webster’s face the whole night, as he bobbed his head above his instrument.
The setlist was mostly drawn from their recent albums, with three tracks from this year’s A Skeletal Domain — “Kill or Become,” “Sadistic Embodiment,” and “Icepick Lobotomy” — coming in a row at the end of the first half. But a few classics surprised and excited the crowd, particularly “Stripped, Raped, and Strangled,” from 1994’s The Bleeding, and “I Cum Blood,” from 1992’s Tomb of the Mutilated, introduced by Fisher as “a love song…about shooting blood out of your cock.” Ultimately, they played fourteen songs with ruthless efficiency, never stopping for more than a few seconds. Fisher’s stage banter was limited to demanding that the crowd mosh harder, or headbang as fast as he could: “You will fail, but you can try.”
― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, 12 January 2021 02:10 (three years ago) link