Band:	Corpsegrinder
Album:	Corpsegrinder
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	February 2022

01. Acid Vat [feat. Erik Rutan]
02. Bottom Dweller
03. On The Wings Of Carnage
04. All Souls Get Torn
05. Death Is The Only Key
06. Crimson Proof
07. Devourer Of Souls
08. Defined By Your Demise
09. Master Of The Longest Night
10. Vaguely Human

Chris Barnes has been in the news again lately, disparaging “what [death metal] has become” and taking aim (this time metaphorically) at another roster of superior vocalists, among them his replacement in Cannibal Corpse. Listen well, kids: don’t be a Chris Barnes. Be a Corpsegrinder.

Through a convergence of many factors, George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher has become one of death metal’s most recognizable personalities. First of all, he’s hard to miss – he’s a mountain of a man with a neck made out of steel and he cuts a clear silhouette. It’s no wonder his likeness would be emulated for Nathan Explosion; paint him battleship grey and between his appearance and his voice you could mistake him for the USS Iowa. There’s the personality part of his personality, too; unlike his aforementioned predecessor, Corpsegrinder has gained a reputation for being a relatively normal dude, the wholesome family man whose extremophile eccentricities live side-by-side with an affinity for fun and fluff. Most of all, of course, there is his voice. Extreme metal is still a young genre, so Corpsegrinder’s three-decade-plus tenure in the scene places him among the longest-serving harsh vocalists out there, and yet even today his vocals are to be envied: articulate and intelligible, as forceful as a raging hurricane, and as harsh as the searing gaze of the sun over an endless desert.

A voice with that kind of power and longevity is incredible to behold, but a classic guttural growler like Corpsegrinder can function in only so many contexts; some listeners will undoubtedly wonder why this material was not simply applied to another Cannibal Corpse album. You may reasonably ask whether a solo album was truly necessary, for Corpsegrinder’s Corpsegrinder’s Corpsegrinder does sound about as redundant as that very phrase when stacked next to the more recent Cannibal Corpse works; his vocal phrasings are quite similar and he’s applying them to another batch of fairly simple and highly aggressive death metal tracks, so if you catch the scent of anything from Torture onward, don’t be shocked. That’s not all there is to the album, however; while I have no idea who deserves writing credit for any of this, Corpsegrinder’s taste for hardcore comes through quite clearly on a lot of tracks, with the frequent injection of slow breakdowns and mid-tempo cyclic pummeling taking us a lot closer to slam than a true-blue CC rehash would have. Even a lot of the more traditional death metal elements pick up a lot from thrash, and while I wouldn’t call this album terribly distinct from the straightforward death we were all predicting, there is clearly room for Corpsegrinder to dig into some more personal sounds and get a little punky.

The production strays a little closer to expectations, helmed in collaboration by Jamey Jasta and drummer Nick Bellmore; the meaty slabs of brutal riffing have a big crunch that is both crisp and barbed with distortion, on the one hand packing a lot of volume and on the other lacking a lot of the grungy filth that still lurks even in Cannibal Corpse’s cleanest era. The modern sheen over a deathly hardcore sound makes it feel like a Jasta project, and when you take into account that the backing band, the aforementioned Nick Bellmore and his brother, Charlie (guitars/bass), has also performed on the last couple of Dee Snider albums, themselves the result of a challenge issued to Snider by Jasta, you can begin to hear a bit of a “house style” coming into vogue. That’s fine for what it is, but over time it blanches into an unremarkable sound that all the two-bit metalcore bands showing up in my inbox have decided to describe, unhelpfully, as “modern metal.”

There are, in fact, a few major distinctions between Corpsegrinder’s debut and anything from Cannibal Corpse; it’s just that they aren’t particularly flattering. For all the guff they get about being the AC/DC of death metal, Cannibal Corpse have a rather idiosyncratic rhythm section, and the tag-team of Alex Webster and Paul Mazurkiewicz is among the best in the genre. The Bellmore brothers are certainly skilled, but this album lacks the same organic quality in its groove, and the bass is noticeably less audible to boot; though directness is the aim of the album, the absence of that complex undercurrent hurts the impact. Even the guitar lines aren’t as hooky or meandering as some of Cannibal Corpse’s, and when you lose the deep sound that Erik Rutan and others have helped the band shape over the last decade, it becomes clear that there is nuance to Cannibal Corpse that is missing here.

As similar – and, therefore, underwhelming by comparison – as this is to recent Cannibal Corpse, I wouldn’t say that the whole Corpsegrinder venture is a wasted experiment. The capacity to diverge further is evident, and I, for one, think that there would be a lot to get out of a purer hardcore or thrash album with Corpsegrinder in charge. Moreover, a lot of these tracks will play beautifully live – “Acid Vat,” “On Wings Of Carnage,” and “All Souls Get Torn” could easily stir up a crowd for a good throwdown. For now, though, I’m inclined to treat Corpsegrinder as a modest first step in a potentially intriguing solo career that may deliver more down the road.