Cannibal Corpse - Red Before Black

With every album release Cannibal Corpse’s steadfast dedication to their original mission of creating gratuitously grotesque, slasher-film, gore-covered death metal becomes more and more impressive. Whether each addition is up to standards is always the million-dollar question though.

At this point, anyone who’s even casually familiar with Cannibal Corpse should know exactly what they’re getting into with each album. With their very straight-line trajectory, the band have also set very clear expectations for each new album. The band’s catalog is so homogeneous, any fan’s favorite couple of records could be easily switched out for another set. This could sound like a jab at their highlight records as minimally different from their less stellar releases, but for those who do have a taste for their signature take on death metal, it’s just an ode to Cannibal Corpse’s consistency. Even though a few of their early releases are widely agreed to be death metal classics, there’s no real consensus on what their best album is. There isn’t even an easily categorized two way split between old/new or Barnes/Corpsegringer either; it’s like having a dozen political parties running Congress with the same gorrific motive, each convinced they’re the group representing the cause best. Though the band do have a few slumps in their discography, they never slump so low they disappoint their audience, and one fan’s slight disappointment is easily one of another’s favorites. While this safe play is a bit unbecoming of a band so keen to sound dangerous, Cannibal Corpse have been so consistent with the technicality of their performances, their embodiment of brutal bloodshed and gore, and even their ability to come through with a few surprisingly catchy songs on each album that they can still arguably be considered a necessary force in death metal.

With each new comically blood-soaked album cover representing a slew of brutal song titles, fast riffs, brutal growls, and tight rhythms (Red Before Blackbeing no exception) it’s always a question of if Cannibal Corpse can again conjure the horror and brutality they’ve specialized in with similar potency. Can they somehow imagine fresh, original scenes of bloodshed and torture to describe? Can they somehow find new musical ideas in the sonic landscape they’ve ravaged seemingly every square inch of? This year, the answer is yes… to me.

Since Kill’s release in 2006, Cannibal Corpse have found their modern sweet spot in terms of production. On that album and every album since then, the guitar tone has been deliciously nasty, with a hint of vintage mid-level in there, and the mix of each instrument has been optimally balanced, fitting their style like a glove. Even “Happy Birthday” would sound brutal through those amps. Red Before Black benefits from this well-engineered heaviness within each note, and while the band do seem to be having a hard time coming up with disgusting lyrical topics that they haven’t already touched on, musically they don’t sound quite so aimless or forced. The relative diversity in pace across the tracklist and within each track is a great asset to the album’s listenability from start to finish; songs like “Firestorm Vengeance” feature the band’s technical prowess at high velocity as the main attraction, while slow-burners like my personal favorite “Code of the Slashers” let the sharkskin-tough tone of the guitars at low frequencies do the grating at the flesh of the eardrums. My other favorite songs are probably the strangely catchy “Scavenger Consuming Death” and the down-tuned sustain-indulgent, double floor tom accented “Remaimed”, but, as with any Cannibal Corpse album, these songs and this album could be another man’s trash, mine being the formulaic and too-familiar title track and its preceding album opener trying to be “The Time to Kill Is Now”.

Fourteen albums in, Red Before Black is in no way doing anything revolutionary for the still-expanding genre of death metal and its resident evolutionary living fossils Cannibal Corpse. But that’s their niche; they are death metal’s horseshoe crab. They don’t evolve because they don’t need to. They’re viscous enough to defend themselves from any predator interested in them and they are certainly brutal enough to continue slaughtering the prey they find and reproduce a steady genealogy of gore-obsessed albums. Whether this album becomes one of my favorites of theirs depends on how much of it I whimsically gravitate towards while I look for gym-spiration or brutal roadtrip accompaniment. With its numerous highlights, its prospects look pretty good though.