Originally written by Chris Redar
Fresh from their appearance at the Gathering of the Juggalos, young Buffalo upstarts Cannibal Corpse have recorded and are preparing to release their thirteenth studio effort. They’ve also decided that ‘unnecessarily dark and boring as shit’ is the direction they’d like to take with their cover art, apparently. A Skeletal Domain’s artwork looks like it could have been the censored version of Gallery of Suicide. It’s unattractive in every imaginable sense of the word.
Is that as important as the music? Definitely not, but for a band that has courted constant controversy based on the ultra-violent nature of their artwork, it almost feels like a betrayal of trust to feature a near-fantasy painting straight off of a booster pack of Magic cards.
Let’s take a step away from the cover art and get to the business at hand: This is a step above Bloodthirst and Gore Obsessed, but it’s also quite a step back from previous effort (Torture) in terms of quality. Cannibal Corpse usually has a knack for opening an album, so it’s odd that they chose to lead off with what could have easily been a B-side. “High Velocity Impact Splatter” lets the opening dissonance ride for a few seconds too long before it drops into a mid-album slow burner pace and an incredibly weak trad-blast from Paul Mazurkiewicz. You never hear that style from Corpse, and now it’s abundantly clear as to why. Also, vocal effects are most definitely not a good look on George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher — between the reverb and the layering, this sounds like a half-assed Cattle Decapitation impression.
“Sadistic Embodiment” shall be considered the true opener, then. The classic Mazurkiewicz d-beat, the dual squealies from Pat O’Brien and Rob Barrett, the bong-rattling bass of Alex Webster, and Fisher spitting lyrics like the death metal answer to Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony—THIS is the Cannibal Corpse that gets asses out of seats and into pits. The title track, arguably the standout of the bunch, plays a bit of a practical joke in making you think that it’s going to be the ‘slow jam’ of the album before dropping the hammer and going for balls-out speed on all fronts for nearly the entirety. It’s similar in nature to the brutality found on the previously mentioned Torture (and before that, on Kill).
It’s also somewhat of a standalone — a majority of A Skeletal Domain is a race to the middle, with song length being the difference between enjoyability, tolerability, and utter dreck. “The Murderer’s Pact” takes the dual role of being both way too long and miserably pointless, saving most of the weaker cuts from a fate of equal or greater pointlessness by sheer virtue of its existence. For example, the lyrics of “Kill Or Become” are decipherable to its own detriment, as it sounds like they were written by a fan of The Walking Dead who just finished listening to “Break Stuff” by Limp Bizkit, and is also nine years old. But, hey, at least it’s not “The Murderer’s Pact”, right? Carry on, Cannibal Corpse. And yeah, go ahead and write a song with a terribly nonsensical title like “Asphyxiate to Resuscitate”. Just don’t call it that other title, or record that bland riff again.
Touching on the vocals a bit further, it’s odd that the band is electing to use more and more vocal effects and that Fisher is slowing down. One of the main draws in the Corpsegrinder era has been his ability to cram an insane amount of decipherable syllables into lines while simultaneously switching from his barked low to his skin-peeling high. What we’ve been getting recently, with A Skeletal Domain being no exception, is a ton of mid-range and not a ton of switch-ups. The highs were the best highs in the business, man! Is it out of necessity, perhaps? Regardless, it gets dull over the course of forty-five minutes.
Ultimately, this is a Cannibal Corpse album. It’s not breaking any new ground – in fact, it’s actively attempting to not innovate or branch out. We’re dealing with one of the most storied bands in death metal, and also one of the most consistent. On the sliding scale of that consistency, A Skeletal Domain lands in the ramen zone: You definitely won’t be hungry for more once you’ve had a helping, but it does hit a spot that desperately craves that stuff that’s awful for your guts, if only once in a while.
