I like pro-wrestling. I find it absurdly entertaining and, like any wrestling fan I have my favourite characters. One of those is The Undertaker.
“that’s all very well Mark you wanker, but this is supposed to be an album review for a metal website not some two-bob Tinder profile”
Bear with me.
In about 1994 the WWF ran a story which was all centered around a “fake Undertaker”. Don’t ask me to explain the story as it makes less sense than Diane Abbott on Countdown.
This story culminated in a match at that years Summerslam PPV between the “fake Undertaker” and the real deal Undertaker. Everything about the story was shit and it bombed. Sure it was mildly entertaining in a “you fucking what?” kinda way but that was it. You can probably see where I’m going with this now.
Cannabis Corpse, if you didn’t know, started as a side project for Phil Hall from Municipal Waste. Their first album “Blunted At Birth” came out in 2006. The Cannibal Corpse weed parody song titles contained such gems as “Force Fed Shitty Grass” and “I Cum Bud”. Funny. But only for five minutes. Thing is their take on death metal wasn’t that bad. Certainly it won them enough (probably red eyed unwashed dope fiend) fans to release another few albums of daft DM with amusing song titles. They even branched out from CC piss-takes to include other classic death metal bands in their sonic muppetry. Deicide (Dead By Bong) and Morbid Angel (Immortal Pipes) to name but a few. Then, in 2014 they released “From Wisdom To Baked” which contained the same thing but this time with Death getting the weed treatment. Now, there are a few bands that, in my opinion, you shouldn’t fuck with…..whether affectionately or not….. and Death is one of them. Songs like “Indvidual Pot Patterns” and “Medicinal Healing” gave me the hump just by reading the titles.
Please, consider however that I’m 46, grumpy, steadily growing less and less tolerant of musical clownshoes and don’t smoke weed.
Now here we have their fifth album…..”Left Hand Pass”. Five fucking albums this bunch of stoners have made!
Musically, again, it’s not bad. A big improvement over the first two albums for sure. But come on lads, how many more records with weed puns can you make? You’re kicking the arse out of it! As you can gather from the album title, they are giving it to the Swedes on this but (and you remember I said there were some bands you shouldn’t fuck with?) Bolt Thrower get the treatment too on songs like “In Battle There Is No Pot” (fer fucks sake) and the opener “The 420th Crusade”. Nile too with a “Papyrus Containing the Spell to Protect Its Possessor Against Attacks from He Who Is in the Bong Water”….but that’s ok because ol’ Colonel Sanders does have some fucking stupid song titles anyway.
Anyway the songs aren’t bad, there’s some pretty catchy and brutal songwriting on tracks like “420th Crusade” and “Grass Obliteration” and it’s all played super competently and will no doubt satisfy their fans…..if they’re able to find the CD among their bongs and family packs of Wotsits.
Still, it’s better than anything SFU have done in the last ten years. Now, where’s that Tankard album? [Editorial note, I gave that one a miss as thought how many more albums about swigging beer from them do we need ffs, oops?]
(6/10 Mark Eve)
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