Cannibal Corpse
Kill

THE REVIEW

There exist musicians/artists endowed with such a radical and nonconformist vision of things (or Art) that they are considered criminals or offenders of human decency... So stubborn and faithful to their visceral art that they are determined to go against what the common mass believes or thinks at any cost... Often, these are precisely the best, those endowed with capabilities and faculties simply too far from the norm for the masses to grasp and understand.

The Cannibal Corpse are among these extraordinary individuals. Sacred monsters of the stars and stripes of death metal, musicians with simply superhuman technical abilities (with the exception of Paul Mazurkiewicz who, honestly, has never impressed me) and visceral and violent artists fully devoted to a raw, nihilistic, perverse, and disturbing imagination which they have made a banner and a point of pride, rejected and abhorred by the majority of the public musical opinion. However, our lads have always responded with a middle finger and with albums released at intervals and with a regularity of almost maniacal devotion, completely uninterested in gaining any sort of consensus beyond that slice of die-hard fans of the most violent, heavy, and indigestible music the world knows.

There are those who say that death metal is nothing more than noise played randomly and that, for such reasons, anyone can play it. When I hear such things, I often feel the urgent need to have a 600-watt stereo set at hand to unleash all the seismic power of albums like this one, 'Kill', released in 2006 and responsible for the renewed authority that these five cannibals have managed to reclaim in recent times. Not that they've ever needed it, but we know all too well how incestuous and disgusting musical scenes with whorish integrity have made too many ravages of the old glories, as even the most invincible gods of metal cannot remain unaffected.

'Kill' is yet another anvil of incandescent metal which the five remold and reforge with each new release, seeking to refine the roughness that the old times didn't allow them to improve and looking to instill ever more technically disturbing structures and metrics purely for the pleasure of experimenting and musical exploration. Extreme metal is by nature resistant to widespread dissemination, but there are works that deserve to be known by everyone, for the joy of confronting the self-righteous with a simple 'no' or a more caustic 'go to hell'. 'Kill' is among these works, and Cannibal Corpse are the artisans and creators of a sound monster with simply extraordinary potential.

There are few ways to open an extreme album that with a well-placed scream, and George 'Corpsegrinder' Fisher knows this all too well to attempt a different route. His screaming is the key to an abyss of endless inhumanity and wickedness, the Cannibal Corpse seem determined to gather all the rot and wickedness of the world into a single, small compact disc and spew them out all at once, in a visceral and depraved catharsis. There are no lapses, no technical flaws, the five are compact in a terrifying manner and their singer is a bloodthirsty beast. Few things express the blindest and grimmest rage, the uncontrolled fury, and the aberrant bellowing of the darkest parts of the human soul better than the music of Cannibal Corpse. Few musicians can equal them in skill, power, and precision.

Alex Webster, mastermind of the cannibal corpse since its birth and creator of much of the conceptual sphere behind it, is a virtuoso of the four strings that truly makes you angry (yes, angry), because he deserves crowds of mediocre musicians without art at his feet. Pat O'Brien is something bordering on non-human, perhaps the ultimate instrument that completed the consolidation of Cannibal Corpse as an intimidating technical reality, his rhythmic parts are whipping blows of hallucinatory precision, with a controlled rage and a inhuman creative power that he seems to dose in already lethal drops, and his solos on the borderline between paroxysmal noise and melodies from a criminal asylum are what Kerry King wouldn’t dare even in his most unusual fantasies. Rob Barrett is the perfect counterpart and the support that such destabilizing creative power needs, Paul Mazurkiewicz a competent drummer who deserves credit for holding on in the band until now and George Fisher is the final brick, a black Mephistopheles with a rapist’s sneer leading the thirteen songs into the deepest abysses of Hell of the human spirit.

Albums like 'Kill' (and 'Reign In Blood' by Slayer is its definitive master) seem created to test the limits of human endurance and, if one reaches the end ('Infinite Misery', the final instrumental, is evocative of such ruin and perversion to make one vomit), one reaches it wondering how those five managed to play such an album. I don’t know. I just want to thank them for existing and for championing the cause of musical intransigence and extremism with a faith and devotion very rare to find in today’s bands.

Thank you, guys, and sorry, but I need a break because you just can't listen to albums like these more than twice a day.

Whoever does would be the real lunatic...