Cannibal Corpse - Torture

So it seems I'm going back in time, at least to the beginning of the year.
Also I'm on holiday as of tomorrow so that "Every Day" bit is actually going to start applying. This review will be shorter, as so many of you people pointed out to me that Koloss was quite rambling and didn't talk about the album too much.
So Cannibal Corpse. Most important Death Metal band still going. They have a legacy a mile wide of obscene lyrics, incredibly graphic cover art and visceral songwriting. The first thing that you notice with Torture though is the cover art. After the ho-hum cover of Evisceration Plague and the pointless one for Kill, it's so nice to see one of their albums to carry on the tradition set by covers like Tomb of the Mutilated, Butchered at Birth and the Wretched Spawn. Once you remove the cover slip designed to protect the little kiddie's minds as they look through HMV's metal section for Black Veil Brides, you can notice:

• Some poor fella's face peeled from the skull with the greatest "Oh shit." expression on his face I've ever seen.
•  A woman who's had some sort of foetus reinserted into her womb.
• A rat nestling inside someone's exposed intestines.
• That all these poor souls have been strung up on barbed wire. Imagine that for a second, hanging by your wrists with barbed wire.

OH SHIT indeed, my friend.

As a little experiment on the side, now imagine a thin wire, glowing red-hot being slowly pushed down your penis-hole. SLOWLY. Funny how you can recall the sense of pain so well, isn't it?
Either way, the artwork is wonderfully brutal and accurately sets the tone for the aural assault that you're about to subject yourself to. As ever, the boys don't fuck around with getting the album going, so they open with a double salvo of "Demented Aggression" and "Sarcophagic Fury", featuring a relentless, full-on battering from the battery of Paul Mazurkiewicz, a feat seemingly impossible at his age. Then you've got the guitars and bass that you've come to expect from a Cannibal Corpse record: Really fucking fast, fingers dancing on the fretboard and sounding like a rusty chainsaw while they're at it. Then they pull a curveball. Simply put, "Scourge of Iron" is slow as cricket matches. If I were to draw a comparison with a song from a previous album, I would compare it to the title track of their previous effort, Evisceration Plague. But unlike that song, this song is astounding. How Cannibal Corpse, one of the most intense bands outside of Grindcore, manage to put in a song this slow and nail it? A Remarkable achievement, and real credit to Eric Rutan for overseeing this album, as he's found a place for everything in the mix wonderfully whilst getting the best sound out of Rob and Pat's instruments.
Of course when I said earlier that the band are known for their obscene lyrics, the only people who still hold that opinion are those who know the name in passing. With the departure of Chris Barnes, so went the ridiculously over-the-top content. We all know now that there's not going to be another "Necropedophile" or "Meat Hook Sodomy", but I believe the lyrics are better now, the vocals included. Say what you want about the raw appeal of Barnes' super gutturality but the Corpsegrinder just has considerably more clarity in his voice, a greater range and a far stronger stage presence. This comes flying out at you in full force (save for the live performance bit) on Torture, as every line has been rehearsed, tried and retried until it fits best with the music and is as sonically clear as possible, much to the album's credit. This is no longer the young Cannibal Corpse with minimal production and sloppy performances, this is a tightly-oiled engine with complex time signatures, blistering solos and a charismatic frontman leading them all!
The rest of the album though, does not seem to manage the same level of intense assault that you get in the first 2 tracks. Maybe it was just my fatigue, in which case I MUST GROW STRONGER, they all kind of slip by. Past "Encased in Concrete", I can't recall any guitar lines or any lyrics bar the song title, save for one moment. The absolute pinnacle of the album comes on the 8th track, "The Strangulation Chair" where about 2 minutes in you hear an unbelievable bass solo straight from hell. I've always admired Alex Webster, and to hear such a perfect showcase of his talent is marvellous.
But even with the songs kinda falling into a routine, I still have to marvel at the songwriting on this throughout. Torture has some of the most complex riffs, solos and counterpoint between instruments I've seen from Cannibal Corpse ever, and they still manage to keep the songs razor-sharp and incredibly tight! From a musician's standing (ie MY stand point) this is a wonderful example of how to write Death Metal. It makes you bang your head, run into other people, marvel at the dizzying complexity and eat babies. So yeah, buy that!