Guest Star: Cannibal Corpse

By Alicia Schuster

Senior Staff Writer

Published: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Updated: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 18:04

photo: courtesy of Cannibal Corpse

When they’re not looking all scary, the members of Cannibal Corpse enjoy taking long walks on the beach, cuddling with kittens, and playing Marco Polo.

Death metal wouldn't be as brutal if there weren't controversy to it. The members of New York band Cannibal Corpse are all too familiar with controversy-their violent lyrical content and gruesome album imagery have been banned in Germany, the U.S., and Australia. But getting banned or censored doesn't stop or slow down this shock-metal band in the slightest.

Supporting the new album Evisceration Plague, Cannibal Corpse will be playing the Gothic Theater with fellow metal groups 1349, Skeletonwitch, and Lecherous Nocturne. Cannibal Corpse creates frightful music with deep, growling vocals in the same vein as Six Feet Under and Slayer. Some of the tracks the band is famous for are titled things like "Meat Hook Sodomy" and "Necropedophile." Hopefully it would be obvious that these songs aren't meant to be serious. 

"We're 20 years old now; you'd think by now if people were going to start mass murdering each other because of our music they would have already done it," said lead singer George Fisher during a recent interview with Metal Underground.

Live sets are just as intense and evil-sounding as listening to the album for the first time. Unlike similarly extreme shock metal band GWAR, the group members don't come out in costume and there isn't massive blood splatter on the audience. The props are taken out and the band and audience can focus on the raw trashing metal.

Since the band tries to play a song from every album at each show (and it has 11 albums), the show should offer a trip through Cannibal Corpse music history. Like other metal sets, the overbearing growling mixed with the quick drums always seems to create spiraling mosh pits that suck crowd members in almost unwillingly. The only blood splatter to expect at a Cannibal Corpse set is from the impact of bodies slamming into one other in the spinning chaos of the pit.

Cannibal Corpse
7:30 p.m., May 3, Gothic Theater
www.cannibalcorpse.net