Music / Reviews
Review: Cannibal Corpse, Motion
We might be stuck in Hipstertown, but no one should underestimate Bristol’s appetite for old-school death metal. This show was originally booked in at the Bierkeller, where it sold out almost immediately. Then it was shifted to the Marble Factory, and finally upgraded to Motion, which is heaving with gorehounds. So leave your good taste in the offal bucket by the door and dive right in to the Tomb of the Mutilated. (Chuck your liberal qualms in there too: there’s proper academic research that reveals why we love this stuff.)
If you’re looking for an all-singing, all-dancing show, you’ve come to the wrong place, pal. The Floridian veterans perform under unchanging lights of just the one hue (blood red, obviously). George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher stands centre stage, windmilling his hair in between grunty outbursts. He’s flanked by co-founding bassist Alex Webster (who recently had a monstrous prehistoric worm named after him by a palaeontology professor fan) and guitarist Pat O’Brien, both of whom headbang furiously. Second guitarist Rob Barrett is positioned so far to the side of the stage that he’s virtually in darkness. Behind them, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz hammers away at an unflashy kit. He’s a farm-dwelling vegetarian, you know. In a band named Cannibal Corpse.
Opening with Code of the Slashers from current album Red Before Black, the Corpse deliver a set that takes in tracks from most of their 14 albums and concludes, as usual, with Hammer Smashed Face (y’know – the one from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). But in truth this is a band who’ve found their niche and stuck to it, with a few subtle tweaks here and there, not unlike Status Quo in a different era with a different audience and very different music, freight train riffs and squealy solos in place of 12-bar boogie. So while, say, Gutted from 1991’s Butchered at Birth is greeted like an old eviscerated chum, it’s not actually that far removed from the song that follows, Corpus Delicti, even though they were composed 26 years apart. The Corpse have taken some flak for this, but the upside is that it leads to an impressive consistency across their splattery ouevre, so we never live in fear of a ghastly piss-break power ballad.
is needed now More than ever
This stuff would never work without a suitably rabid audience. Fortunately, Motion is packed with a very much up-for-it Friday night crowd, seething with moshers and crowd-surfers. Of course, death metal started out as an underground phenomenon and was never expected to appeal to so many people, so it helps that these gnarly oldsters know exactly what they’re doing. That doesn’t prevent 47-year-old Mr. Corpsegrinder whining about his advancing years, at least until he challeges everyone to a headbanging contest during I Cum Blood (yes, kids – it’s The Wanking Dead), promising: “I’m gonna do it faster than you, I’m gonna do it longer than you, and I’m gonna do it better than you!” Holy crap – he just turned into the death metal Donald Trump. Now that’s really scary.
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