CANNIBAL CORPSE
MACABRE, CEPHALIC CARNAGE, CATTLE DECAPITATION
Graceland, 206-381-3094, $16 adv.
5 p.m. Sat., Nov. 30
IMAGINE INCISORS tearing into skin and meat as the last dribbles of blood squirt from the cooked veins of a turkey leg—there’s so much food, you just want to roll around in it like a pig.
It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without gorging on fowl and spending hours trying to keep from throwing up. It’s a ritual feast of nauseating excess and consumption.
And what better way to spend this holiday weekend than embracing gory excess, sloth, and gluttonous bodily functions with Cannibal Corpse?
The Buffalo, N.Y., death-metal quintet—along with openers Macabre, Cephalic Carnage, and Cattle Decapitation—should provide the perfect soundtrack to the sickening aftermath of the heralded holiday. Like a Thanksgiving table smeared with gravy, gnawed bones, and half-eaten vegetables, Cannibal Corpse songs are strewn with images of putrefaction and human waste.
Sure, most death-metal bands’ lyrics obsess over the inner workings of the body and how to dissect it. But Cannibal Corpse truly takes evisceration to the next level. The long-running splatter-core group’s eighth album, Gore Obsessed (Metal Blade Records), is an appropriately titled battle zone filled with songs about savage butchery, hatchets to the head, hungry zombies, and people “sanded faceless.” The band batters its songs with similar hatchet-swinging ferocity, cutting to the quick with guitars tuned to skeletal tones and chain-saw-massacre rhythms.
Their lyrics, too, read like recipes for consuming human remains:
“Feast on the corpse, suck out his brain/ As its fluids drip down the drain/Chew on the bones, drink from its bladder.”
Vocalist George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher grunts and growls his lines like a dog angrily guarding its meal. While words are often difficult to discern, guitarists Jack Owen and Pat O’Brien churn out frenzied riffs as bassist Alex Webster and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz bludgeon with violent precision. It’s not sippin’ music—it’s blood-guzzling catharsis. But that’s not to suggest the members of Cannibal Corpse aren’t adept and serious musicians. On the contrary, their songs are meticulously structured riff symphonies that just happen to have tongue-in-cheek titles like “Dormant Bodies Bursting” and “Compelled to Lacerate.”
Still starved for more Cannibal Corpse gore? Fresh off the chopping block is the Monolith of Death DVD, which features a blood-splattering array of video atrocities that accompany the band’s rippling music.
Go ahead—bite off more than you can chew.
