Trivia / Cannibal Corpse

• Banned in China: The commercialization of their albums and merchandise was banned in Australia (this case was because censorship law reforms were in process there back then) and Germany until 2007 and 2006, respectively. The case of Germany only applied to their first three albums, however.
• Black Sheep Hit: An album-specific variant. While their Signature Song "Hammer Smashed Face" is a good example of their Barnes-era sound, it thematically sticks out from the rest of Tomb of the Mutilated, being a simple Murder Ballad rather than following the album's basis on rape, necrophilia and other sex-related crimes.
• Bonus Material:
  • A number of CD issues of The Wretched Spawn and Evisceration Plague come with DVD discs of documentary videos detailing the albums' recording and production.
  • Similarly, initial CD issues of Kill in Germany and Brazil feature a DVD of a 2004 concert at Strasburg, France.
• Creative Differences: Several instances:
  • The core of why Chris Barnes was fired, on both ends. He was not getting along with the band at all by the end, had a side project (Six Feet Under) that was going somewhere and he liked way more, didn't like the direction that Cannibal Corpse was going in, and knew that they were going to do what they wanted to do and his opinion didn't matter. On their end, they were sick of fighting with him and dealing with the constant tension, were frustrated with his technical limitations and declining vocal ability, and wanted to go in a more technical direction that they knew he would take issue with, and when he went out on tour with Six Feet Under while they were in the middle of working on what would become Vile, they knew that Barnes had to go and they had to get a new guy. Barnes, if anything, was relieved when they contacted him while he was on tour with Six Feet Under to tell him that he had been replaced, as he was going to quit after he got back and told them as much. Furthermore, the issues with Barnes almost resulted in Alex Webster and Paul Mazurkiewicz leaving permanently after the touring cycle for Butchered at Birth had concluded, as tensions between them and Barnes had grown so bad over the course of the tour that they actually did leave the band for a week. This also resulted in the creation of "Hammer Smashed Face", as the two wrote that song to blow off steam and vent their frustration with Barnes, and they brought it back with them when they decided to rejoin and give the band a second chance.
  • Bob Rusay was fired more over musical issues than anything else. While he was an integral part of the band in their early days, his stage presence was better than his actual playing, and his increasing sloppiness caused the band to implore him to take lessons, which apparently didn't do much good. After he did such a poor job during the recording sessions for Tomb of the Mutilated that Jack Owen had to redo his leads, they finally realized that he was a lost cause and had to go.
  • Rob Barrett rage-quitted from the band in 1997 after a blow-up over musical differences, particularly over Mazurkiewicz (whose drumming style was too simplistic for Barrett's tastes) and their decision to move in a more technical direction (as Rob was a thrasher at heart and wanted to go for a faster and more brutal style). He eventually managed to patch things up with them, and when Owen left the band in 2005, the ensuing discussion was along the lines of "hey guys, I was a big dumb idiot in 1997 and I fucked up, but I'm in a better place now and I want to give it another go", and he rejoined without a hitch.
  • Barrett is also less than a fan of some of Barnes' more extreme lyrics, stating plainly in a Guitar World interview that he'd been "outvoted" on more than one occasion, citing "Entrails Ripped From a Virgin's Cunt" specifically.
    "It just didn't make sense to me, and as the father of two young daughters, I was uncomfortable with using the word 'cunt'."
• Creator Backlash: Rusay took his firing extremely hard and entirely disavowed his time in the band. Webster, Mazurkiewicz, Owen, and Barnes have all apparently tried to reach out to him on numerous occasions over the years, but he has consistently ignored them.
• Creator Breakdown: While it is still unclear just what led to it, Pat O'Brien had a violent breakdown days after returning from tour in late 2018 that led to his arrest and forced him to go on an indefinite hiatus before he eventually left completely.
• Creator's Oddball:
  • A Skeletal Domain is this in comparison to most of the Fisher-era releases. While most of their later releases have individual motifs to distinguish them, A Skeletal Domain has more unorthodox and quirky compositions when compared to their usual style (namely "A Murderer's Pact", which features a full-blown neoclassical shred lead from Pat), as well as a much cleaner and more modern production style. Much of this can likely be owed to the influence of Mark Lewis, who produced the album (as opposed to Erik Rutan). Fan opinion is generally divided, but it is generally considered to be one of their lesser releases, and the band themselves have said that it is too clean and polished for their liking, which led to their decision to go back to Rutan, and while "Kill or Become" has become a live staple and is one of the most famous Fisher-era songs, they have not played anything else from the album since its tour cycle concluded.
  • For the Barnes era, Eaten Back to Life. Even taking into account its Early-Installment Weirdness status, it still barely sounds like anything else they've done. It has far more overt thrash influences and Chris uses a mid-register hoarse shout that renders his voice borderline unrecognizable and that he's never redone in Six Feet Under (unlike the other albums with him, where the vocal style he used has been revisited at least once by him after).
• Development Hell: Fisher's Serpentine Dominion studio project (also featuring Adam Dutkiewicz and Shannon Lucas) got its start in 2009, when the three talked about it while touring together on that year's iteration of the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Fest. It took seven years for the project to finally see an official release, by which point Lucas had long since left The Black Dahlia Murder.
• Fountain of Expies:
  • Corpsegrinder, within the death metal scene. Both his look and vocal style have been emulated by numerous other musicians.
  • In fact, the band themselves, for death metal. If you ask someone to name a death metal band, chances are it's going to be these guys (unless the person you ask doesn't know much about death metal and says "Slipknot" or "Slayer".).
• He Also Did:
  • Alex Webster is also known for being a member of the bands Blotted Science and Conquering Dystopia. Two Instrumental bands known for their extreme technicality.
  • Before joining, Corpsegrinder was the original vocalist for Monstrosity, performing on their first two records, Imperial Doom and Millennium, the latter of which was released just a few months after Vile. He also has done numerous guest appearances for other extreme metal bands, and is a member of the deathrash supergroup Voodoo Gods and a former member of melodeath band Paths of Possession.
• Hostility on the Set: Barnes' final days with the band were marked by constant fighting and tension, and it all came to a head during the recording sessions for Vile. Barnes got into almost-daily shouting matches with the rest of the band that sometimes got violent, and any attempt to get him to try something different from what he had in mind was guaranteed to result in adamant refusal. When Barnes announced that he had a run with Six Feet Under coming up, it became a race against the clock to get his vocals done before he flew out, but he did such a piss-poor job tracking vocals (culminating in Barnes walking out of the studio and not coming back after Alex Webster told him that they were not at all happy with his lines on "Devoured by Vermin" and were rewriting the lyrics whether he liked it or not) that the band finally accepted that he was a lost cause and had to be fired for Cannibal Corpse to be able to survive.
• In Memoriam:
  • Eaten Back To Life contained a dedication to "the memory of Alfred Packer, the first American cannibal (R.I.P)".
  • The physical releases of Violence Unimagined feature a dedication note to Mazurkiewicz's father, Paul Mazurkiewicz Sr., who had died two years before the album's release.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Chaos Horrific has a deluxe edition box set that features one of several variants for the album's vinyl version, a jigsaw puzzle, an enamel pin and a two-sided poster.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • For the 15th anniversary of the band forming in 2003, they released 15-Year Killing Spree, a boxed set featuring two "Best Of" CDs, a third CD with unreleased demos, and a DVD with 3 live performances by the band.
  • For their 20th anniversary in 2008, they released Centuries of Torment: The First 20 Years, a three-disc DVD set featuring a documentary that reunited almost all of the band's members.
  • For their 25th anniversary in 2013, they released Dead Human Collection: 25 Years of Death Metal, another boxed set containing CDs of all of their studio albums released up at that time, the then-released Torturing and Eviscerating Live on CD and vinyl, a calendar and new artwork from Vince Locke.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Pat O'Brien was a huge fan of Cannibal Corpse well before he joined.
  • Erik Rutan was not only a fan before joining, but a life-long close friend of the band's members well before he started producing for them. How life-long? He received a copy of their debut album before it was even officially released. Upon becoming a member himself, he stated that his relationship with the band came full circle.
• Rarely Performed Song: The band played "Frantic Disembowelment" live exactly once before permanently retiring it from their setlists, as it's a ridiculously technical song that is physically painful to play, and, while the most well-known song from The Wretched Spawn, is nowhere near enough of a fan favorite to justify slogging through it.
• Reclusive Artist: One of the band's two original guitarists, Bob Rusay, left music entirely after he got kicked out the band, and went on to become a golf instructor. He was the only member who couldn't be reached for an interview in the Centuries of Torment: The First 20 Years video album.
• Referenced by...: The band is mentioned in an exchange from Deathgasm:
  Medina: I can't stand mic cupping.
  Brodie: Cannibal Corpse do it.
  Medina: No. Barnes used to do it. Fisher... it's straight from the guts.
  Brodie: Shit. Did I just get schooled?
  Medina: I'm a very fast learner.
• What Could Have Been: They have been mentioned for the soundtrack of the 2010 re-adaptation of Splatterhouse. Unfortunately, it never happened.
• Working Title:
  • Vile was originally going to be titled Created To Kill. Before Chris Barnes left the band, they recorded some of the songs for the album with his vocals and different lyrics.
  • This also applies to some of Vile's songs. "Orgasm Through Torture" was originally "Gallery of the Obscene", and "Eaten From Inside" was "To Kill Myself".

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