Cannibal Corpse’s Six Best Slow Songs

Here are Cannibal Corpse’s six best slow songs.

The death metal legends are among the most consistent bands in the scene, reliably cranking out high quality records that are technical, catchy and feature unmatched lyrical brutality. The deranged and frantic nature of the music is the ideal compliment to a bottomless well stories about all the violent things you can do to humans.

As violent and gory as Cannibal Corpse are, they’ve always viewed their music to be like an audio version of a horror movie, rather than reflecting any real-world internal desires to carry out any of these atrocities.

Sometimes, however, those lyrics are ripe for sludgy, ominously slow moments to really draw out the agony. Check out Cannibal Corpse’s best slow songs below.

CANNIBAL CORPSE’S SIX BEST SLOW SONGS

“Evisceration Plague” (Evisceration Plague)

Let’s kick this off with the title track to Cannibal Corpse’s 11th album, which came out in 2009.

Evisceration Plague was the band’s first to be recorded using click tracks and this title track obviously benefits from forced restraint. It oozes forth with some familiar, slithering hammer-ons and a crawling, chunky riff that establish the backdrop for an apocalyptic tale about a pathogen that infects people and fills them with the desire to slash and kill others.

And this isn’t a crazed, temporary loss of sanity — the slow pace makes it clear that these incisions are calculated and utterly agonizing.

Over the years, “Evisceration Plague” has become one of Cannibal Corpse’s most played live songs.

“When Death Replaces Life” (Gore Obsessed)

The second to last track on 2002’s Gore Obsessed, “When Death Replaces Life” has grungy/industrial overtones that immediately set it apart from so many other Cannibal Corpse songs.

One of their catchiest riffs that even has just a slight trace of black metal in its dissonance comes in and drives the first half of the song. Things kick up to a more urgent mid-tempo rhythm and psychedelic soloing (by death metal standards, anyway).

Life drips away…

“From Skin to Liquid” (Gallery of Suicide)

Gallery of Suicide is Cannibal Corpse’s most musically diverse album with the moody “From Skin to Liquid” crammed right in the middle of the 1998 LP.

This instrumental is the closest the death metal icons have ever come to writing a Morbid Angel song. That slimy riff gets even slower as the runtime stretches on, entering full-blown doom territory.

READ MORE: Can You Guess the 14 Death Metal Albums From One Piece of the Cover Art?

“Scourge of Iron” (Torture)

Okay, this one starts off pretty fast, but that only lasts for 10 seconds and the bloody beatdown is on!

“Scourge of Iron” is fan-favorite from 2012’s Torture, riding a slow-burning, menacing chug. An occasional double bass boost teases tension-relieving energy that finally comes once things get frantic near the end.

Oh, and it’s about being tortured and flayed in Hell with metal whips. Creative, huh?

“Festering in the Crypt” (The Wretched Spawn)

Not many riffs in the Cannibal Corpse canon feel like they’d also work for Prong, but at least one does — the intro to “Festering in the Crypt.”

Anyway, this is another one that does have some fleeting faster bits (it’s death metal, not death-doom for a reason), but its torturous pace defines it in a way that reflects another grisly postmortem scenario.

We all know festering is a process that takes some time, exemplified by these punishing guitar parts.

“Festering in the Crypt” is, lyrically, quite simple — once you’re buried in the ground, you’re going to turn to a bunch of bodily slush and mush. Except most of us won’t be buried with our eyes and mouth shut, hacked limbless. Win some, lose some.

“Bloodlands” (Vile)

With the arrival of George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher on vocals, Cannibal Corpse’s sound began to morph a bit, signaling a new era.

There were already huge strides made on The Bleeding, compared to the first three albums of the Chris Barnes era. And while Cannibal Corpse had entertained mid-tempo and some other sluggish ideas, nothing was as fully formed on the slower end until “Bloodlands” off 1996’s Vile.

The nervous tempo is, at times, countered by frenzied bursts of adrenaline to convey the mental state of the subject trapped in these “Bloodlands.” The subject cannot figure out how they arrived in this desert-like wasteland that fills them with visions of mass bloodshed and unbearable physical torment that took place on these grounds.

Of all the tracks here, this one is the most equally slow and fast. But it’s too good to keep this list to just five songs!

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