Hold on to your intestines. Buffalo’s finest (via Florida), Cannibal Corpse, are back to shred your organs, peel your skin, and violate your ears in the vilest, sickest ways possible with new album Red Before Black.
Having used producer Mark Lewis (Whitechapel, The Black Dahlia Murder) on 2014’s A Skeletal Domain, the band have returned to the welcoming arms of Erik Rutan, the man responsible for the recent classics Kill, Evisceration Plague, and Torture (all Metal Blade). Whereas A Skeletal Domain was a suitably brutal and well-produced record, apparently the band felt it was a little too well produced, and lacked a certain rawness. Something they’ve more than made up for this time.
Things were never going to start with lilting acoustic ballads about pretty flowers or bouncy, fluffy bunnies, but opener ‘Only One Will Die’ is particularly vicious, even for Cannibal Corpse, pulverizing your senses like a chainsaw ripping through unprotected flesh, and possessing a chuggy middle section capable of removing spleens from a hundred yards.
Beginning with all the subtlety of a concrete block dropped on you, the title track grabs you by the throat and screams its sadistic intentions into your terrified face before casually disemboweling you with various rusty surgical instruments afterwards. Things slow down for ‘Code of the Slashers’, before its punishing grind gives way to more familiar, pummeling speed. Switching between the relentless groove and unfettered fury, ‘Shedding My Human Skin’ and ‘Remaimed’ combine to crush neck vertebrae beyond recognition, the former featuring a savage shout-along chorus surely to feature in many upcoming live shows.
‘Firestorm Vengeance’ and ‘Corpus Delecti’ show the band can still do complexity as well as brutality, while the superbly titled ‘Heads Shoveled Off’ does not give one single fuck. Bassist Alex Webster gets to add to the rumbling maelström of violence during ‘Scavenger Consuming Death’ as well as combining perfectly with drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz and guitarists Pat O’Brien and Rob Barrett for arguably the album’s most absorbing track.The superb ‘In The Midst of Ruin’ is a cascading waterfall of blood and human tissue, ‘Destroyed Without a Trace’ does exactly what it says on the tin, and closer ‘Hideous Ichor’ could not be more appropriately named if it tried.
As ever, the primordial, bellicose roar of George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher dominates proceedings, but never overpowering his colleagues. It’s also nice to see a bit of splatter back on the album cover after the disappointingly restrained artwork for A Skeletal Domain. Although unlikely to ever wish to recreate such controversial cover art such as Tomb of the Mutilated or Butchered at Birth, at least there’s a little more spurting red stuff this time.
Another disturbingly barbaric triumph for the band, the song titles may not have the shock value of their early material, but amid the limb-strewn carnage lies a refinement and sophistication that separates Cannibal Corpse from many of their peers. You just have to dive under a mountain of rotting bodies to find it. As you would expect, the band’s detractors will find literally nothing to change their minds here, but the devoted faithful are highly unlikely to be disappointed with this latest blood-soaked offering.
9.0/10
GARY ALCOCK