Cannibal Corpse - Under the Rotted Flesh

Riff mark: 1:08

Well…dat cover tho, for one. You uh…ugh…forget it. Divert all attention towards the nonexistent progression of Buffalo’s non-quintessential quintet and the creative stagnation, ripe and pungent, festering into a 2^nd studio autopsy report. First, it sounds awful. The guitars are tiny, tinny, and squeaky, and the bass and snare sound nothing like drums, or even triggers. It’s just an unsettling mix, off-putting even for death metal. The individual performances…remember that scene in the movie Red Dragon where Hannibal Lector ate the off-key flautist? Nevermind. Chris Barnes is letting his testicular gutterals drop to the scrotum in a vocal performance I can only describe as coughing and burping simultaneously. Neither Owen nor Rusay can solo and regretfully, do often, but compensate with half-decent riffs for 70% of the recording. I’ve yet to distinguish bassist Alex Webster in the orchestration (and he writes a good, bloody chunk of this stuff!). Paul Mazurkiewicz is still learning how to play drums and plays fast, but not well (whatever he’s doing with his ride cymbal during those downbeat thrash patterns should just stop). So, while the debut was flawed but fun, Butchered at Birth is unappealing, uninviting, and unpolished, the Garbage Pail Kid shooting snot rockets for attention in 1991, a year in which Carcass and Death flexed cranial muscles and invented new possibilities in a genre longing for theory and discipline.