With a name like Cannabis Corpse, a couple of things are certain right off the bat:
1. They have some level of admiration for Cannibal Corpse.
2. They love the weed.
Beyond that, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I signed on to review their sophomore album, Tube of the Resinated – hey look, it’s a play on Tomb of the Mutilated, just like their previous album Blunted at Birth played off of Butchered at Birth! How much farther would their wordplay go? Moreover, being a bunch of potheads, which direction would the music take, and would they become the “Weird Al” Yankovic of death metal by doing parodies of Cannibal Corpse songs? I was eager to find out.
I first expected original tracks done in the usual stoner/doom style. With song titles like “Mummified in Bongwater,” “Sentenced to Burn One,” and “Gallery of Stupid High,” it seemed a logical guess. With the first notes of “Chronolith,” though, this was quickly erased. Not only were they taking liberties with the moniker and titles, they were completely lifting the Cannibal Corpse sound and style, so much so that I started to believe the “Weird Al” theory, but even that was disproved after whipping through a few tracks. What we have here then is a band that, for all intents and purposes, sounds exactly like Cannibal Corpse would sound if they wrote songs about getting high instead of killing people. If you played this for a casual fan, their first question would probably be whether or not Cannibal Corpse got a new vocalist. Hell, I’ve been listening to Cannibal Corpse for years, and my first instinct was to go back to their catalog and make certain these were originals – but as previously stated, turns out I didn’t have to.
I’m not really sure how to go about describing a band and album that so closely resembles something else. It’s not “death metal in the vein of Cannibal Corpse,” it just IS “Cannibal Corpse death metal.” If you’ve heard Kill, Gore Obsessed, or really any of the Corpsegrinder-era albums, you can get a pretty accurate idea of what the album sounds like. I’ll try to pull up some highlights:
– At the 2:42 mark of “Disposal of the Baggy,” there is a breakdown riff that is just catchy as hell.
– The opening of “Every Bud Smoken” sounds straight off of The Bleeding.
– The verse riff in “Experiment in Horticulture” reminds me a lot of the chorus to “Make Them Suffer” (from the aforementioned Kill).
Other than mentioning that the band includes Municipal Waste bassist Philip “Landphil” Hall, there isn’t much else to say. Cannabis Corpse is simply the weed-obsessed doppleganger of Cannibal Corpse. Although it may be hard to take them seriously with this “gimmick,” they are indeed a serious band with serious chops, and I can imagine they would do just fine if they dropped the whole thing.
