5 Minute Review: Cannibal Corpse — Violence Unimagined
It’s weird to be getting excited about a Cannibal Corpse album in 2021. When they emerged in the early 1990s, with their debut album Eaten Back to Life (1990) and its breakthrough follow-up Butchered at Birth (1991), Death Metal was at something of a standstill in its evolution. The idiosyncratic approaches of bands like Morbid Angel, Nocturnus or Death et al had given away to an almost uniform sound of guttural vocals, blast beats and technical riffing, with dozens of bands who were largely interchangeable. Sure, Death Metal had perfected sonic extremity in metal, an alchemist’s quest that had passed through Speed Metal, Thrash Metal and Grindcore during the 1980s; but suddenly everyone was brutal, heavy, and fast in an almost identikit way, save for minor nuances. It had gotten pretty boring, to be honest.
At the time, Cannibal Corpse felt like the epitome of this creative fall-off for Death Metal. They sounded like dozens of other bands from that period but stood out by simply upping the ante in terms of lyrical themes and aesthetics, with cartoonish levels of violence and gore to be found both on record and accompanying artwork. Musically they were nothing bad — their songs were brutal and technically proficient in all the right ways; there were plenty of killer riffs, even if these felt more like random assemblages, often without any central theme or motif to hold them together. But their notoriety was founded on the extremity of their overall presentation rather than their musical accomplishments, not just in the metal scene but also in broader public consciousness. By the mid-90s, there were attempts to ban their work by self-appointed bastions of American morality like Bob Dole and C.Dolores Tucker, and they even appeared performing in Jim Carrey comedy vehicle The Mask (1994). They had become one of Death Metal’s biggest acts more by way of notoriety and lowest common denominator appeal than artistry. Or at least, that’s how it felt at that time.
By contrast, their nearest rivals in terms of Death Metal popularity, Morbid Angel, continued to pursue their own eccentric agenda throughout the 90s and proved that a degree of creativity and commercial viability could go hand in hand in Extreme Metal. As a challenge to Death Metal itself, Black Metal would redefine extremity not just in terms of sonics but also in terms of ideology, weaponising metal’s ability to evoke sentiments that transcend far beyond the rote act of making brutal, guitar-based music. As such, no self-respecting underground metal fan in the mid-late 90s had any need for Cannibal Corpse, if the truth be told.
Yet here we are in 2021. Morbid Angel have all but nuked their place in the Death Metal pantheon with a cringeworthy attempt at industrial metal followed by a failed, mediocre attempt to return to their roots[1]. Black Metal has been codified into a set of tropes to be endlessly regurgitated and memed, its once-radical mindset now replaced with a dull conservativism that seldom throws up the sort of creative vision possessed by early Burzum or Darkthrone (not to mention, with some irony, a morality that is closer to the Christianity it once sought to displace). As for Cannibal Corpse… a few personnel changes aside[2], they have carried on doing what they’ve always been doing with unwavering consistency throughout the decades, now releasing their 15th album, Violence Unimagined. And, against all expectations, it is an exhilarating listen.
The thing is, in these intervening years, it seems that Cannibal Corpse have become very good at being Cannibal Corpse. Which is also to say, they have become very, very good at meat and potatoes Death Metal. Sonically there is nothing on the album that strays from that very basic sound palette that the genre established and had become entrenched in all those years ago. There are none of the faddish adornments that have become part of contemporary extreme metal; there are no ambient intros or acoustic interludes; there are no clean vocals providing radio-friendly pop hooks; there are no slam breakdowns or Djent squeals. Violence Unimagined is 43 minutes of uninterrupted, unabashed Death Metal but constructed and performed with such confidence and mastery of the art that it doesn’t need anything else. Every song is packed full of riffs that are not just killer in their own right but flow effortlessly into each other, creating a sense of dynamics that keeps the listener glued for each new twist and turn without ever letting the intensity level fall below f***ing relentless. The guitars are deployed with a technicality that never sounds flashy simply for the sake of it and are complemented by drums that follow suit. Vocal phrases are wrapped around each section of each track in a way that makes them memorable, reinforcing the sense that you are listening to actual songs here, and not merely some vein-busting noise to be forgotten once it’s over (sadly a problem with most modern metal and hardcore).
Beyond the onslaught of sonic and lyrical violence on display here, there is an almost zen-like sense of all elements being in their right place, with never too much nor too little of anything. Kinda weird to think of a Cannibal Corpse album in that way; but then, as I said, it’s kinda weird to find oneself getting excited about a Cannibal Corpse album in 2021.
Cannibal Corpse’s Violence Unimagined is out now on Metal Blade.
[1] 2011’s llud Divinum Insanus and 2017’s Kingdom’s Disdained
[2] The most recent and significant of these being the replacement of long-serving lead guitarist Pat O’Brien with Hate Eternal’s Eric Rutan. Rutan has not only produced the band’s output for the past decade but was also a member of the aforementioned Morbid Angel in the mid-90s. O’Brien’s departure follows what appears to be a psychotic episode involving guns, flamethrowers and human skulls: https://youtu.be/gKip5wOkN40
