Recap Cannibal Corpse at The Rave/Eagles Ballroom

Cannibal Corpse has been in the game for 20 years, and despite less-than-flattering sound at The Rave/Eagles Ballroom on Saturday night, the veteran death-metal band was clearly on top of its game, performance-wise. Relentless road dogs, Cannibal Corpse hit Milwaukee as part of a headlining club tour that wraps up at the end of April, after which the band heads to Japan and then back to the U.S. for this summer’s Mayhem Fest 2009 tour. This short run of Canadian and American dates are in support of Cannibal Corpse’s 11th studio album, Evisceration Plague, which recently debuted at No. 66 on Billboard's Top 200 chart, pulverizing previous Top 200 appearances with 1996's Vile and 2006's Kill (No. 151 and No. 170, respectively).

For fast, aggressive and dense music like death metal, a room the size of the Rave is ideal. A space with decent sightlines and a perfectly proportioned stage should be two key parts to a winning concert, but the sound system spewed Cannibal's music in every direction, making for a muddled mix. Short two-minute blasts like "The Time To Kill Is Now" and "Scalding Hail" came off more like compound fractures than clean breaks. Although, slower, heavier tracks like "Perverse Suffering" and "Sentenced To Burn" fared much better. Vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher even apologized to the black-clad crowd during a delay between songs, commenting that something sounded "funny" onstage. (Later, his microphone broke.)

Still, in spite of the sound issues, it was obvious that Cannibal Corpse was playing its guts out. Drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz was a little lost in the mix, but guitarists Pat O'Brien and Rob Barrett and bassist Alex Webster all coupled headbanging that would most likely cripple a lesser musician with insane fretwork. Witnessing the complexity of these songs in a live setting is generally worth the price of admission alone. Fisher, who keeps a lighthearted rapport with the crowd between songs, is all business when he's on the mic, staring down audience members like they've personally wronged him, and headbanging violently when not singing about limbs being chopped off.



Cannibal Corpse generally does a good job picking deeper cuts from its back catalog, and there was plenty to be happy about in that department. "Disfigured" and "Pit Of Zombies" both saw stage time, as well as staples like "I Cum Blood" and "Fucked With A Knife"—dedicated, as always, to the ladies in the crowd—and its contribution to the Ace Ventura: Pet Detective soundtrack, "Hammer Smashed Face," which closed the set alongside "Stripped, Raped, And Strangled" from 1994's The Bleeding.