Cannibal Corpse - Mangled

Riff mark: 1:15

This is the mucleus (sic...[k]) in which angry men and women in suits, wagging wrinkly fingers, demanded justice against a cluster of devilish metal groups and hip hop artists corrupting younglings, much like that freak Elvis or those four weird-sounding British guys who thought they were bigger than Jesus or whatever. Well, the front cover is pretty bad, Vincent Locke (a graphic wizard at these illustrations) throwing fuck-all everything, heads, ribs, giblets, and tombstones against a nuclear sky, and a zombie who’s quite content snacking on himself as the centerpiece. Chris Barnes’ lyrics are slightly worse, reading like an Albert Fish masturbation ritual. Truthfully, his voice isn’t that bad here; it’s alarmingly lucid for this sort of thing, and hasn’t collapsed into its own stereotype as it would a year or so later. Oh, right…forgot there’s music in here. Eaten Back to Life is arguably the least precise mainstream metal album in a Sam Goody. Its innards are a sloppy mess like its packaging, five guys playing instruments like premature ejaculations, always a half-beat off (no pun intended), fingers stumbling around fretboards never seeming to stop at an exact note. Drummer Paul (no I'm not looking up his last name on Wikipedia) Mazurkiewicz is undisciplined throughout, submitting polka thrash beats into weird downbeats mid-measure, amusingly and unintentionally sounding like some weird phasing technique from a Steve Reich composition (I can’t believe I just referenced him in a Cannibal Corpse review). This is turning into the weirdest thing I’ve ever written. Okay, look. If you were a teen in the early 90’s and didn’t live in a metropolis, it’s likely your local music shop sucked and Cannibal Corpse was what you saw first on their shelves. So there’s nostalgia behind what I’d embrace as a pretty fun album, full of good, gooey riffs (but terrible solos).