Cannibal Corpse – Chaos Horrific (Review)

Death Metal’s hardest working cannibals return with their 16th album Chaos Horrific to bring you pain, gore and ten new torturous tunes to flesh your blood dripping teeth around.

After long-time friend and producer Erik Rutan joined the bunch on guitar to replace Pat O’Brien due to his self-inflicted downtime, the Floridian monolith quickly released 2021s Violence Unimagined which showed a lot of reignited fire added to the well oiled songwriting machine. The change on guitar duty lead to absolutely punishing tunes such as Inhumane Harvest, Surround, Kill, Devour or Overtorture, making that album a return to form after the little stale Red Before Black in 2017. However, when it comes to Cannibal Corpse, “stale” still beats out 98% of all other death metal bands.

The question for Chaos Horrific now applies, if they can keep up with the level of quality regained on the 2021 outing. After starting things off with the absolutely devastating and fast “Overlords Of Violence,” that question can firmly be answered with : “fuck yeah, they can”. Those who expected a bigger stylistic shift, compared to Violence Unimagined will be disappointed though, since Chaos Horrific picks up right where the five-piece left off.

Compared to the rest of their discorgraphy however, George “the Neck” Fisher and the boys amped up the groove, making tracks like “Summoned For Sacrifice,” “Bloodblind” and the title track standouts of their catalogue. It is scary with how much ease these guy still manage to write such brutal yet such catchy bangers. And with the subtly more atmospheric closer “Drain You Empty” or the kinda melodic “Fracture and Refracture” we get another glimpse of Erik Rutan’s influence, that manifests itself in multi-layered power chords and reverb-laden tremolo picking.

In total there really is not much to be nitpicky about with Chaos Horrific. Technically, everyone is still at the top of their respective game and the record is flowing really nicely with no real duds in the tracklist, delivering a constant level of quality death metal. Maybe there could have been more of Corpsegrinders High Shrieks we’ve all come to love, but that’s not to take away from his performance in the slightest. That man is still the epitome of a death metal vocalist (at least there are no “EEEEEEEE’s” in here, right?).

Meat is back on the menu and all death metal afficionados should be sharpening their knives to get a piece of Chaos Horrific’s ten filet bites. With their 16th album, within their 35th year of existence, Cannibal Corpse once again shows the death metal world, how it’s done. Time to bang your fucking heads.