Morrisound Recording in Tampa, the first two weeks of June 1992. Metal Blade has paid for roughly double the studio time the band had on either of the two records before it, Scott Burns is behind the desk for the third time with them, and for the first time in the group's life there is money left over for overdubs. What came out of that fortnight is the most consequential record death metal ever made without inventing anything at all.
Two weeks, and a bass guitar in the middle of the mix
Metal Blade released it on 22 September 1992, and the first thing anybody notices is not a riff. It is Alex Webster, audible. Burns pushed the bass up into the centre of the picture instead of leaving it under the guitars where the genre habitually buried it, and the consequence runs through the whole album: the low end has articulation rather than weight alone, the fills are legible, and the record has a bottom the first two do not. Webster has said since that the bass sound is a large part of why the album stayed a favourite among the band's own audience, and on that point the audience and the musician agree.
Burns made a second decision that says more about how these records were actually built. Rather than layering two guitarists who phrased differently, he had Jack Owen track all of the rhythm guitar himself, which produces a wall with no seam in it and leaves the other guitarist, Bob Rusay, playing on a record he had helped write but does not hold up. Rusay was dismissed in February 1993, weeks before an American tour, and Rob Barrett arrived from Malevolent Creation and learned the entire set in a fortnight. The band's stated reason was that Rusay had come out of punk rock and the writing had moved somewhere he did not want to follow. Nothing about that sequence was cruel and all of it was practical, which is roughly the temperature of the whole operation.
Nothing on this record had to be invented. Everything on it had to be executed, and the execution is why it travelled further than the inventions did.
What is actually on it
Nine tracks, and they are faster and considerably more complicated than anything the band had put out before, with the guitar writing sliding into figures that resist being followed and then snapping back into a groove a crowd can hold. "Hammer Smashed Face" is the one everybody knows, and it earns the position: a main figure with a stagger built into it that has been imitated for three decades by people who cannot make it land the same way. "Split Wide Open" is the fastest thing here. "Beyond the Cemetery" closes the record on the most technical writing on it. Chris Barnes is singing lower and wetter than on the previous two albums, and the register he uses here is the one a generation of vocalists copied before deciding they preferred his successor.
Several of the song titles deal in sexual violence. That is a plain fact about the record and it is the reason the objections that followed were never only about the painting on the front, whatever the later folklore says. The band's own position, stated consistently for thirty years, is that the lyrics are horror fiction with no argument inside them. Both of those things are true at once, and this article is not going to pretend otherwise in either direction.
The front cover, and the three states that acted on it
Locke's painting shows two corpses in a sexual act. That is what it depicts, it is why no chain in America would stock it, and a censored front was produced for shops that wanted the record without the picture. Everything downstream of that decision belongs to the story of death metal album art rather than to this album alone, but three governments went further than any retailer did, and their paperwork is a matter of public record.
| Country | From | Scope | Lifted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | Early 1990s | The band's first three albums indexed; the songs on them could not be performed in the country | 2006 |
| Australia | 1996 | The same three records kept out of sale | 2006 |
| New Zealand | 20 February 1996 | The compact disc and its lyric sheet classified objectionable, publication number 9501955 | Indefinite unless reclassified |
The German measure is the heaviest instrument ever used against a band in this genre, because it reached the music and not only the packaging: a set list crossing that border had to be rewritten. It also failed completely at what it was for. A prohibition is an advertisement with a state seal on it, and the fourteen years the ban ran are precisely the years in which the band became the biggest thing in death metal.
Every other record in this chapter was trying to change the music. This one changed the number of people standing in the room, which turned out to be harder and to matter more.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
What it actually sold
The numbers are less spectacular than the mythology and more interesting. By a Nielsen SoundScan count published in November 2003, Cannibal Corpse had sold 558,929 records in the United States during the SoundScan era, ahead of Deicide on 481,131 and Morbid Angel on 445,147, which makes them the best selling band the genre has produced. Their strongest individual title in that count is not this one. It is The Bleeding from 1994, at 98,319, fifth among all death metal albums of the period. So the album that made the band is not the album that sold the most copies for them, which is the usual shape of these things and almost never the way it gets told.
Then there is the film. "Hammer Smashed Face" turned up in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994, in a scene with Jim Carrey, and by the band's own account Carrey was rather more pleased to meet them than they were to meet him. A record prohibited in three countries was playing in cinemas in two of them inside eighteen months, attached to a comedy, and that single contradiction explains more about how death metal reached the general public than any amount of writing about tape trading.
The verdict, and why it is not in the canon
Set this album beside the records that changed the writing, and the case for it collapses in a specific way: name one thing on it that had not already been done by somebody else, and the honest answer is about sales, artwork or a court file rather than about music. The riffs are excellent and they are not new. The production is superb and it is Scott Burns doing what he had already done. On the argument about how it got heavier, this record is a consequence rather than a cause.
What it did instead was decide how many people would ever hear any of this. Every band in the genre from 1993 onwards played to rooms that existed because of it, and that is a real achievement of a different order, worth stating without inflating into an invention it never was. The record that raised the technical ceiling instead of the audience arrived from Montreal four years later, thirty two minutes long and understood by almost nobody at the time, and it is none So Vile.
