Cannibal Corpse - The Bleeding

This is the album where Cannibal Corpse decided that sucking a little bit of cock to get ahead was acceptable for them. After they got rid of the homeless guy with the fucked up haircut, they decided that they could actually play. Funny thing is that the homeless guy was the one who came up with all the brutal riffs. Cannibal Corpse figured that by filling each song with an obnoxious amount of happy sounding hammer-ons, this could somehow pass as a major technical advancement. Oddly enough, the masses agreed.

It always struck me as being rather odd that the homeless guy got the boot yet the drummer has somehow managed to escape the reaper's scythe all these years as that guy has been chumping out the same old half assed blast without a fill in sight.

Chris Barnes, who must've got tired of reading negative reviews of his vocal performance in Metal Maniacs, also decided to "clean things up" as you could  tell that he was making an effort to include diction and articulation with his style and approach. Problem is, is that it sounds too forced. A self conscious endeavor on his part in order to please chump journalists who were never on his wavelength to begin with. It's actually quite sad really. Like a little chump nerd trying to fit in with the local hoods, but he keeps getting punk-slapped upside his birth-marked dome for all his troubles.

The lyrics , on the other hand, are in full form and are exactly what you'd expect from a guy who pisses in dead whores maggot filled assholes. They may not be as wordy as previous Cannibal outings but with song titles such as 'Fucked with a Knife', 'Stripped, Raped and Strangled' and perhaps the most disturbing of all, 'She Was Asking for it', we know that Chris wasn't going to be winning any "Babysitter of the Year" awardany time soon.

I know that most people love this album and many consider it to be the band's best, of the Barnes era at any rate. I can't say that I completely hated this album, but it reeked of insincerity at the time and I've never been able to fully embrace the contents herein throughout the following years. While 'Eaten back to Life' sounded more like a goofy thrash album, both 'Butchered at Birth' and 'Tomb of the Mutilated' were and will always be where it's at for me in regards to CC's "glory years.