I guess sometimes we just have to stop and look around us and wonder what the hell is really happening to the world. While I cannot say I am an actual fan of extreme metal (grindcore, black metal, death metal, etc… ) I have to admit that I do sort of like some of what is done in those areas. Or at least I have explored it more than most people in my age range have. I really like Testament, more of a thrash band I suppose, whose early stuff sounded like Megadeth (to me anyway). I liked them more later after singer Billy Cobb’s vocals got deeper and raspier. I also like Norwegian black metal artists Emperor and a few other similar bands in moderate doses. I even like Napalm Death, Morbid Angel and Carcass at times, but I am not a raving devotee of these genres in any sense. One thing that makes these bands stand out to me is their seriousness and devotion to what they are doing. There is a definite sense of the theatrical involved and one hopes that these guys can leave their onstage personas there after they get back home. While I do own some of the music I do not endorse most of what they sing about or the ways they lead their private lives (however that may be). That disclaimer being noted, I recently got the urge to download most of the Cannibal Corpse catalog. I also found a site that hosts their utterly outrageous lyrics as well as some FAQs about the band. The link is down below somewhere.

Everything they do is over the top and the music is as brutal as the lyrics and artwork that “grace” their record sleeves.The musicianship is outstanding really if you are able to listen to it without losing your mind. The death growls are a little more bearable than with some other bands who do the same thing. The lyrics are indistinguishable but once you get a lyric sheet and read along with the songs the themes are so over the top I can’t help but wonder what these guys are thinking. Is there some sort of inside joke here the rest of us are not privy to? Do they just not want their parents to listen to what they are doing? I once heard an interview on Metal Shop with one of the two main singers in the band’s history, George Fisher a.k.a. Corpse Grinder, (he other influential front man being Chris Barnes) and to be honest he really did not sound like a potential serial killer (they never do, right?) and he was rather quick witted and funny really. I do not necessarily think that being intelligent and articulate can excuse everything you do and in fact makes you more accountable. It is also a fact of life that most people who are blithering idiots do not sell millions of records. Well, I’ll have to tell you, the music is not to everyone’s taste and I am glad I got the stuff free from the net rather than spent money on the collection. I think once the music gets harder than Testament or even Iron Maiden you are in murky waters. But so what. If I were 16 years old and snorting speed and reading the Satanic Bible while listening to this stuff day in and day out who knows what could happen. That is not the case. I am simply a casual purveyor of the strange and twisted, not a true believer.

Their covers have received as much controversy as their lyrics and sparked hordes of imitators trying to outdo the next psycho with a manager with images of murder, dismemberment, cannibalism and ol’ fashioned necrophilia. I believe all of the covers here were done by Dead World illustrator Vincent Locke . In an interview Locke said he had sampled some of the music after he was commissioned to do the covers but said it was not to his liking. Still some people claim Locke captured the real spirit of the band and even had his brother tattoo some of the covers images onto his body. I put a link to some of Locke’s actually fine ,though usually disturbing, work below, but I do not know if I would feel relaxed having tea with a guy who has Tombs of the Mutilated tattooed on his chest. Believe it or not there were a couple images I opted to not post here as they were simply too graphic and intense. As if the ones I selected are more middle of the road I guess. Well what do you expect to see from a band who adorns their songs with such memorable and catchy titles as ‘Dismembered and Molested’, ‘Born in a Casket’, ‘Necropedophile’, ‘Meat-Hook Sodomy’, to name just a few that I am willing to name. After all this is a family oriented blog site.

The always insightful Corpse Grinder ( I wonder if that is the name he has on his American Express?) Fisher explains the music is simply stories, odes to horror movies that are not to be taken too seriously.“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion. [...] All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose, they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We love horror movies. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous”.He made a statement in one interview about this stuff being somewhat no less freaky than some artwork in the Vatican collection. Well, I don’t know. I have to see what he was looking at, because this stuff is really out there. Well, I hesitated to post this stuff but did it anyway. Is there a point? If there is I cannot see it but life does not always need points. In the end maybe the pointless things make the world go round, like pizza, and poodles and the lyrics to Hammer Smashed Face at sunset. This stuff is just something that is out there that people are either fanatical, curious or pissed off about. They are one of the big sellers in the death metal genre and even appeared in a Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura) movie once and were critically targeted by Bob Dole. So, there you go. Just a bunch of dudes next door after all.

For more information than you may really need go here:

http://www.tombofthemutilated.net/FAQ.html

A site with lots of samples of the art of Vincent Locke:

http://vincelocke.com/

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Posters-Covers-Art . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.