Truly, there is no band like Cannibal Corpse. Oh, sure, it’s not a death metal band that may have pushed the boundaries of what the style is capable of nor are they the most innovative band that death metal has seen before and after the band’s inception, but it’s their legacy that cannot be denied in any form. Lurching forth from one album to the next, this band has become one of the faces of the entire history of death metal with every new record being something that’s more than worthy of investigation but fans new and old, and that’s no different this time around. But, it’s with “Violence Unimagined” that we have gotten what could be argued as one of the most potent, capturing, and fleshed out experience that “Cannibal Corpse” has crafted in years.
Now, that statement is not to knock on the more recent efforts from this band. “A Skeletal Domain” and “Red Before Black” have taken a decent swathe of my listening habits ever since I got into the band, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t exciting to see what Cannibal Corpse would bring to their table for their fifteenth full-length outing especially after the impact that 2020 had on the collective human psyche, whose influence definitely has its place in one song here. But, what gets me more than anything else about everything that’s brought forth with “Violence Unimagined” is the simple fact that there’s something much more seductive about the performance at large versus what we’ve gotten before. A supremely done concoction of subtle technical cues in the instrumentation, the staple vocals that are still at a constant high no matter which song you pick, undeniable riffs that are more captivating than what many purveyors of the riff are able to bring forth, and, of course, that godly understanding of what it takes to make good death metal all come together with even a little bit more to make for a performance that does nothing but justice for such an album title! The utter whole of the record is truly a marvel to behold as it is not only another example of Cannibal Corpse retaining their title as one of the greats of death metal with numerous reasons why, but it’s with each and every one of these eleven tracks that we are given a performance that is as unapologetically brutal that we could ever hope for, a return to a cover art that always brings forth verbal shock (the cover we are here is the censored version, so think about that), as well as mastery that is the very definition of all that intoxicating death metal can become in some of its most brutal forms!
After a four-year wait as well as the absolute slog of a year that we’ve all endured, a cathartic and absolutely horrifying record like this is precisely what many of us have been needing injected right into our fucking veins with Cannibal Corpse truly being one of the best to administer that excellence. We could sit here for hours and talk about the macabre beauty that is brought into reality with this eleven-track marvel, but it’s at the end of the day that there is only one description that suits this album and it’s beyond perfect that it serves as the title: violence unimagined.
“Violence Unimagined” releases on April 16th via Metal Blade!
PRE-ORDER “Violence Unimagined” via multiple sources here.
LISTEN to the singles from “Violence Unimagined” on Bandcamp here.
LIKE Cannibal Corpse on Facebook here.
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