I guess I should warn you — if you are here for my political and vaccine rants and aren’t a death metal fan, and you have a problem with ultraviolence and gore in the context of music, don’t scroll down.
Hello all, sorry for the long delay since my last post. Part of it was due to traveling, and another part was that I wrote and deleted multiple posts about the Ukraine War before finally deciding to just drop it completely and get back to complaining about science. As he often does, eugyppius wrote a post that summarizes much of my thinking about Ukraine better than I could myself. I might have more to say on it in the future, but right now the emotions are too raw, and I have good friends from both belligerent countries, so taking my usual sardonic tone while people are dying just doesn’t feel right.
In any case, week before last I went to my first metal show since the beginning of the pandemic — the eternal Cannibal Corpse. Cannibal was never one of my favorite bands except insofar as they really really bothered people from outside the metal world. But there’s no question that their style set the tone for much of American death metal from the 90’s onward, even if others perfected the sound later. Cannibal also deserves huge props for the support they’ve given local metal scenes over the years, and how crazy friendly they’ve been (especially Corpsegrinder) to their fans and the bands that grew up listening to them.
The first record I bought by Cannibal, Butchered at Birth, came with an unmarked, white CD liner because their cover art got banned. You had to send off for it — the record company would send you the real CD liner if you sent them an envelope with a stamp on it, which I did, and received this classic Vince Locke cover:
Later on I discovered Locke’s classic zombie apocalypse genre comic series Deadworld. Anyway, here’s probably my favorite Cannibal track of all time — this was their encore song as the show and it was amazing how much energy the crowd managed to find for it that late.
Here’s another one that came up in my playlist last week. Great video and a great cover of a great song. It’s no secret that Behemoth is one of my favorite bands, but the guest vocals by Shining’s Kvarforth are perfect for the dreamy, gothic atmosphere of this classic Cure track.
The Antisocial Darwinist 