YMMV / Cannibal Corpse

• Archive Panic:
  • The band themselves are on the light end of this, but their 16 studio albums alone run for more than 10 hours with over 170 songs. In combination with their live albums, a few EPs and a documentary, it's easy to spend an entire day listening to them.
  • Chris Barnes is undoubtedly one of the busiest and most prolific vocalists in the history of Death Metal. His studio albums alone with both Cannibal Corpse and Six Feet Under amount to over 200 songs, and that's not including SFU's Graveyard Classics albums and the unreleased rarities from both bands. Add that to his live DVDs and early demos with CC and SFU, plus his session vocals for at least 8 to 10 other bands, and he's arguably been a part of more songs than any other big-name death metal vocalist in the world. Listening to all of his material without stopping would take at least 15 hours, if not more. As of 2022, he's performed on 22 studio albums, which while far from the most a death metal musician has done, exceeds that of everyone at his level of popularity (he's one of if not the only one to surpass 20 albums as of now).
  • Corpsegrinder is possibly only second to Barnes in individual death metal singers, as including Cannibal Corpse, he currently has vocal credits on a total of 19 albums with five different bands, plus a solo album from 2022, not to mention that he has some of the most guest vocal spots in all of extreme metal.
• Awesome Moments: The climactic screech in "Hammer Smashed Face"... you're a robot if it doesn't give you chills.
• Awesome Music:
  • The creepy and subdued atonal instrumental "From Skin to Liquid".
  • "Kill or Become" has a really catchy riff and chorus.
  • "Frantic Disembowelment" is fascinating to see in action.
  • "Scourge of Iron" is a classic mosh-pit anthem.
• Broken Base: Chris Barnes or George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher? Most modern-day fans prefer George, while most older fans prefer Chris.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Oh so very much. Examples of song titles: "Entrails Ripped from a Virgin's Cunt", "Fucked with a Knife", "Necropedophile", "I Cum Blood".
  • Also, ending "Necropedophile", a song about Exactly What It Says on the Tin, with sounds of children playing.
• Epic Riff: "Scattered Remains, Splattered Brains", the doomy opening riffs of "Festering in the Crypt" and "When Death Replaces Life".
• Fandom Rivalry: With Six Feet Under, the band Chris Barnes formed after leaving. Although there are some people out there who are fans of both bands.
• Gateway Series: Along with Death, Morbid Angel, Carcass, Behemoth, Job for a Cowboy, and The Black Dahlia Murder, they are the most common starting point for people who are just starting to get into death metal, particularly those who started with thrash.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Corpsegrinder has expressed his fondness for the Horde in World of Warcraft, and that he only plays as orcs and undead. Bright features an orc character listening to "Hammer Smashed Face", which in his words is "one of the greatest love songs ever written."
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint metalheads have with the band is that their albums can get somewhat indistinguishable from each other, particularly post-Chris Barnes. Of course many of the band's fans don't mind this, seeing the band instead as being one of the most consistent in metal, both in approach and in quality.
• Mainstream Obscurity:
  • There are few people out there who haven't heard of the band's name before, but the average music fan's knowledge of them is ignorance at its finest. It's not uncommon to hear fans of mainstream metal call them out as noisy trash, meaning that despite being the most famous name in death metal by far, only those who actually like death metal know anything about their actual music rather than just about their controversial cover art.
  • Corpsegrinder is one of the most famous people in death metal music, if partially due to his huge neck. What most non-fans don't know is that he was not their original singer or songwriter; Chris Barnes was. In fact, Barnes was responsible for the band's most famous and controversial material, so it's entirely possible that the average person associates Corpsegrinder with songs that weren't even his!
• Misattributed Song:
  • Cannibal Corpse never did a song with GWAR called "We Are Your Enemy"; the song was done by Dying Fetus, and Dying Fetus alone. This mistake has been happening less as of late due to Dying Fetus having become a big name in their own right (markedly less big than Cannibal Corpse, but still one of the higher-selling and drawing acts in the death metal genre at this point).
  • "Damnation" is by Morbid Angel, not Cannibal Corpse. This mistake occurs much less, mostly due to Morbid Angel being the most famous death metal band aside from Cannibal Corpse themselves.
  • They also never covered "Roots Bloody Roots" by Sepultura. That misconception comes from a garage band labeling themselves as CC on p2p programs such as Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire.
• Narm: Sometimes their lyrics get a bit too over-the-top. Case in point:
  • "ORAL SEX! WITH BROKEN GLASS!" from "Force Fed Broken Glass".
  • "Decaying torn-off penises, which the men were made to chew and swallow" from "Remained".
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Many of their lyrics from their Barnes era, particularly on Butchered at Birth and Tomb of the Mutilated, which go into excruciatingly graphic detail of mutilation and necrophilia. The worst is when the lyrics involve children, as is the case with "Necropedophile."
  • Not that all the Corpsegrinder-era songs are any better. "Remaimed", for instance, is a graphic detailing of Rape, Pillage, and Burn, with forced cannibalism and deformed childbirths sprinkled on it.
• Once Original, Now Overdone:
  • The band has been criticized as being rather generic, which is ironic, as they were one of the bands that laid the templates for Brutal Death Metal.
  • Cannibal Corpse, along with Autopsy, pioneered gore-themed lyrics in death metal, but since so many other death metal bands followed suit, this kind of lyrics might seem quite bog-standard for the genre nowadays.
• Signature Song: "Hammer Smashed Face", due to it being played in the aforementioned Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It's also available in Rock Band 2.
• Squick:
  • Most of their album covers, especially the uncensored covers of...
    • Butchered at Birth, which features two zombie-like beings maiming a fetus from a dead woman, presumably to add to a bunch of similar fetuses hanging on the ceiling.
    • Tomb of the Mutilated, with its depiction of what can be summed up as "corpse cunnilingus".
    • Vile. It has a decayed, legless corpse of a man held on the arms by barbed wire, filled with worms on the inside, and with clearly visible genitals.
    • Bloodthirst, courtesy of its Eldritch Abomination-like experimental being presumably made from multiple human bodies, with some kind of winged insect added to the mix.
    • The Wretched Spawn, which depicts a gruesome experiment of making a woman give birth to the children of a being similar to the one of Bloodthirst (apparently oversaw by a pair of guys similar to the ones from Butchered at Birth) with seemingly successful results. Said children appear to be too large that one of them has rip straight out of the woman's womb, while another crawls out of her mouth (and the being looks keen on grabbing this one).
    • Torture. The regular "full-layered" cover isn't exactly bad with the main character visible, but the uncensored cover gives us a graphic view of all the hanging corpses hidden behind the "blood layer", among which we have what seems to be the body of another pregnant woman and a man's cadaver with rats crawling on it.
    • Violence Unimagined. The uncensored cover's depiction might not necessarily be the most depraved of the lot, but it makes up for it with sheer graphic detail that was never seen in any of their covers up to this point, really showing the Art Evolution of artist Vince Locke over three or four decades. We've got the monstrous woman from the censored cover devouring a baby (complete with a placenta seemingly from her own), which isn't even the most nauseating part, as there's also a pair of dead corpses of men littered with all sorts of wounds on them surrounding the woman. It says a lot that Paul Mazurkiewicz ranked this cover as the second-most disgusting of all the band's studio album covers, only behind Butchered at Birth.
  • A lot of their songs count as this trope as well.

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