Do you remember the last time Cannibal Corpse released an album that wasn’t a total bore from beginning to end? I’m having a hard time remembering the answer to that question myself. I remember the last time I picked up a Cannibal Corpse album and felt satisfied with the money spent, that was 1994, when I picked up The Bleeding. Since then, the band has changed considerably, not just line-up wise, but also musically.

Back in 1994 Cannibal Corpse were playing mid-paced catchy heavy death metal, a sound that really suited the group. Skip forward a couple of years and the deep grizzly bear vocals were replaced by higher pitched raspy growls, the mid-paced catchy heavy music was replaced with a faster more technical approach and anything and everything that made the band interesting was replaced with repetitive monotony. With every release since the departure of Chris Barnes the band has morphed into an entirely new entity, unfortunately, in the comparison between Cannibal Corpse of 1994 and 2004, ye olde band totally shits on the corpse of new in nearly every aspect.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Chris Barnes supporter, my beef isn’t with the vocals, as George Fisher is by far the superior vocalist, the problem with Cannibal Corpse is that the core of the band, Paul Mazurkiewicz, Jack Owen and Alex Webster just do not have the technical proficiency to pull off playing the music they’re wanting to play today. The real problem with the band came with the departure of Rob Rusay, at that point Cannibal Corpse were a band with average technical skill and they played music to compliment their musical level. Since then they’ve added two guitarists to try to get the sound they’ve been dying to create, first Rob Barrett who brought the band to another level and dragged them to the height of their technical abilities, then came ex-Nevermore guitarist Pat O’Brien, a capable musician but not one who can push the band to another level.

For the most part, since 1996, Cannibal Corpse have essentially remained in limbo, having not really written a memorable song, let alone album, just taking the Vader approach and recording virtually the same song with different vocals on every song on every album in an attempt to sound like the band which Pat and George were with, although for Pat it was a very brief stint, Monstrosity. The unfortunate part of this is that Paul Mazurkiewicz is nowhere near the same caliber as Lee Harrison, Jack Owen and Pat O’Brien aren’t even in the same league writing-wise or skill-wise as Sam Molina, Tony Norman, Jason Morgan, Jon Rubin or Patrick Hall, and while Alex Webster is by far the best musician in Cannibal Corpse, he’s still unable to compete with the technical wizardry of Kelly Conlon or Mike Poggione. If you don’t believe that last statement, just listen to Kelly’s display on Death’s Symbolic and Monstrosity’s In Dark Purity and Millennium or Mike’s bass lines on Capharnaum’s Fractured and Monstrosity’s Rise To Power. They crush him and leave him weeping into his cornflakes. The only area Cannibal Corpse can even compete is vocally, and even then, Jason Avery isn’t overpowered, except maybe in the area of stage presence.

Seriously, if you’ve bought Vile and any single album after it, you’ve heard The Wretched Spawn, it all sounds the same. The song structure is the same, the riffs are virtually identical, and the vocal patterns are all the same, it’s just more of the same. Cannibal Corpse need to wake up and realize that they are not the technical wizards they believe themselves to be and to go back and write in a style that suits their abilities. Go back to writing simplistic music, go back to dumbing it down, because they way they’re going now, the only people who are dumb are the people who buy this rehashed, unimpressive wanna-be technical garbage and think it’s amazing. The only other way the band will improve will be; get rid of Pat O’Brien and toss Paul on his ass and replace the two of them with proficient musicians who can actually add something to the music and help change the direction of the band. Replace Paul with someone like Dave Culross and Pat with… pretty much any guitarist who can write a decent riff, and then, and only then, will I actually begin to take even a casual interest in Cannibal Corpse. Right now, they’re fucking awful and need to retire.

Written By: Teufel