Cannibal Corpse at Myspace

To celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary, Metal Blade Records has released this 3-disc retrospective DVD chronicling the history of Cannibal Corpse, and it is excellent. I’m normally not that interested in music-related DVDs, but this one is packed with interesting information and hilarious footage. Disc 1 contains a three-hour documentary on the band’s history that features all Cannibal Corpse members past and present (except founding guitarist Bob Rusay, who was apparently impossible to track down). There’s scarcely a wasted moment on this disc; my favorite parts were old footage of band members screwing around with a camera and how lead singer George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher gave most of his interviews in front of a bookcase full of action figures that were still in their boxes. I knew he was nerdy, but not that nerdy! I also liked getting to see people associated with the band who I previously only knew by reputation; cover artist Vince Locke looks nothing like you’d expect someone who drew such gory images to look like.

Disc 2 is a set of Cannibal Corpse performances from all eras of the band (although the Barnes era is underrepresented). I liked this disc, but it was my least favorite of the three; I’ve never really cared that much for live DVDs. The second disc also contains all of the band’s videos. Disc 3 contains a bunch of themed collections of footage that didn’t make it into the first disc. My favorites among these were “Sickening Metalocalypse,” which covers Fisher’s recurring role on the Adult Swim show; “Every Ban Broken,” which discusses the censorship problems that the band has faced in countries like Germany and New Zealand, and “Covered With Ink,” which shows how die-hard Corpse fans have gotten images from the band’s notoriously gruesome album covers tattooed on them.

I only have one major complaint about this DVD set- the sound just isn’t loud enough! I watched this on my laptop, and even with the volume turned all the way up, it was noticeably less loud than actual Cannibal Corpse songs being played on iTunes on the same laptop. You’d think that a DVD about a band like CC would be as loud as possible. But despite that, I heartily recommend this DVD set. It’s highly entertaining, reasonably priced (at just $25 US), and has plenty of material (well over seven hours). I give it five out of five skinless, rotting cadavers.

Porkfarm at myspace

Playing a style of Death Metal very similar to Dying Fetus, Brain Drill, Necrophagist, and Beneath the Massacre, Young English Death Metal act Porkfarm display an apt control over both the brutal and technical sides of the genre. They keep the technical wizardly and the “slam” side of their sound under control displaying in where the song progresses to a point where either of them is needed but not veering off into either direction willy-nilly and it is this disciplined approach that gives this six song EP an air of supreme professionally.

At Nineteen minutes this release makes you demand more. Along with the Tech-Death and Slam influences some of the songs such as “Suffer” and “Torn Apart” have some old school influences such as vintage Morbid Angel and Deicide, and with many new bands falling into the deathcore/wigger slam trap its great to see a new band making death metal how its supposed to be made. Definitely one to watch in the future

Cephalectomy at Myspace

Cephalectomy hail from Nova Scotia, and they play a heavily Kataklysm-influenced style of deathgrind which they have dubbed “mystigrind”. Their latest release, The Dream Cycle Mythos, consists of just one 23-minute long song, which goes through multiple segments, including both growling and screeching vocals. Typically fast and brutal grindcore segments are punctuated by creepy synthesizer interludes reminiscent of Morbid Angel’s Formulas Fatal to the Flesh, with a little bit of mid-tempo metal thrown in near the end.

I personally greatly preferred the bear-grunting to the shrieking, but that’s just personal taste. I also didn’t like the use of a drum machine, as Cephalectomy had employed an actual drummer on previous albums, but some of the drum parts are so insanely fast that it’s understandable that they made that choice. One part near the end of the song stuck out to me as being extremely fast and noisy just for the hell of it, but most of the rest of the EP is strong. This release is definitely worth picking up for fans of grindcore and brutal death metal.

Trephination official website

After looking back at the fifteen reviews I’d written so far for this site, I realized that out of them, only one was fully negative, two were mediocre, two were guilty pleasures, and the rest were positive. I came to a conclusion: I need to review more shit. Some background: I found this 3-song EP in a used bookstore attached to the Free Library in Philadelphia. Most of the CDs there were stuff no one would ever want, but I’d found a few gems there, and I was curious about this, wondering out of sheer morbid curiosity what it would sound like. Well, it was just as bad as I feared.

First of all, the lyrics are terrible. “Cloned Reoccurences” starts with some genetic technobabble, and continues with some horrible lyrics about how someone’s clone is committing atrocities. At one point, the phrase “50,000 less niggers” is mentioned- yes, Trephination is a white power band. “Threading the Twine” is a hackneyed song about suicide by hanging, and “Citadel” is an equally cliched song about the Eastern front in WWII.

But the lyrics wouldn’t matter that much if the music were good. Unfortunately, it completely sucks. The vocalist sounds like he’s hacking up phlegm (in a bad way), the riffing is completely generic, the solos sound out of place, the bassist might as well have stayed home, and the drumming frequently sounds like one of those wind-up monkeys. Trephination don’t have any releases to their name besides this, and it’s not hard to see why; apparently, they weren’t even good enough to hack it in the white power scene. Stay far away from this one.

Aeon at Myspace

Aeon. They’re the first band alphabetically in my library,  and a damn good one. Rise to Dominate continues their brand of brutal death metal started on their EP, Dark Order, and first full-length, Bleeding the False. First of all, I have to single out the lyrics as one of the high points. They are incredibly anti-Christian and incredibly silly, but that’s why I love them. They do slip into Engrish at times (or whatever you call bad English spoken by Swedes), but the lyrics are already silly so it doesn’t matter a lot. Also, Tommy Dahlstrom’s vocals are easy to understand.

It’s amazing how this album can be so catchy and so brutal at the same time, as evidenced in songs such as “You Pray to Nothing” and “House of Greed” (I especially love the latter’s hook of “BURN! THE! CHURCH! DOWN!”). Musically, the band is excellent; the songs tend to sound a little samey, but I thought the drums really stood out, and the guitars have those jagged edges I love in metal. I’m also glad that the band has abandoned the filler intros that were on Bleeding the False. This is a great brutal death metal album, and I hope to hear more from these guys in the future.