CANNIBAL CORPSE - Kill

Killer stuff!

I have had a long, complicated but, all in all, romantic relationship with this album. Not being a die-hard Cannibal Corpse fan, I have never listened throughout their entire output so I don't feel entitled to decide if Kill is or isn't the best album by the notorious veterans of brutal death metal. All I can say is that, after many years of my music taste oscillation and existential crescendos (whatever that means), it ended up being my favorite album by them.

It might have been the case with releases like The Bleeding, but Kill is a rare case of a brutal death album that keeps my attention riveted past the first two tracks. A common problem with many brutal death metal releases is the lack of variation that leads to the chicken pâté syndrome - the first sandwich is delicious, but by the end you feel a little sick. Now, the thing is Kill isn't even that varied. What makes it engaging is that, even if uniform, the songwriting and the clean-yet-organic sound production are both solid throughout. In some ways it's the quintessential modern brutal death metal album. Pleasantly familiar and straightforward structure-wise, it elevates the quality of the bulk of its content with mindbogglingly groovy breaks ("Murder Worship"), passages of technical brutality ("Five Nails Through the Neck") and, most of all, spot-on rhythm variations ("Necrosadistic Warning"). In other words, instead of kicking your ass all the time, it unexpectedly slams your head into a wall, breaks your nose, pulls your eyes out and hits you in the stomach. It basically makes you suffer. Sadly the songwriting gets more generic towards the end of the record and that's actually my only - although serious - problem with the album.

All that being said, Kill's biggest selling point is what made every other Cannibal Corpse album before it so successful. It's genuinely brutal and it doesn't try to prove anything else besides its unwavering devotion to what makes brutal death metal enjoyable - gore, groove and grit. In other words, if Kill were a slasher movie, it would be a good slasher movie. If not for the more generic songwriting in the second half, it would have been a great one.