CANNIBAL CORPSE — Butchered at Birth (review)

CANNIBAL CORPSE — Butchered at Birth album cover Album · 1991 · Death Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
UMUR
"Butchered at Birth" is the 2nd full-length studio album by US death metal act Cannibal Corpse. The album was released through Metal Blade Records in July 1991. "Butchered at Birth" was recorded at Morrisound Studios and produced by Scott Burns. The gory cover artwork for the album, which depicts zombies opening a pregnant woman´s womb with a knife and removing the baby inside to place the child on a meat hook, was censored in several countries and Germany even took it a step further and banned the album completely. It was therefore not until June 2006 that "Butchered at Birth" saw a German release. My own vinyl copy features a completely red front cover with the bands logo and the title of the album written on it plus two stickers. There´s a parental advisory sticker for the cover artwork (which comes as an insert in my version of the album) and a sticker for the language content, which of course in trademark Cannibal Corpse style is vile and gory. I guess song titles like "Meat Hook Sodomy", "Covered With Sores" and "Under The Rotted Flesh" speak louder than words.

The music on "Butchered at Birth" is brutal and technically well played death metal. Usually fast-paced but the tempo varies and there are mid-paced heavy parts on the album too. Chris Barnes had already proven to be one of the most brutal death metal vocalists on the scene with his performance on "Eaten Back to Life (1990)" but he raised the bar again for how brutal growling vocals could sound on "Butchered at Birth". To my ears that´s for better or worse though since his brutal delivery is now completely unintelligible. The vocals are brutal as hell but the fact that it´s hard to catch more than a few words throughout the album is probably an aquired taste.

The album is loaded with brutal downtuned riffs, the above mentioned brutal vocals, and packed in a pretty filthy, dark, and raw sound production that suits the material well. The tracks are generally a bit one-dimensional in nature and they are not always easy to tell apart, even though some tracks feature more recognisable hooks than others. Considering the fact that "Butchered at Birth" is only a 9 track, 36:35 minutes long album, it´s simply not varied enough to maintain the listener´s attention throughout. When that is said, all tracks, if listened to one by one, are high quality brutal death metal, so it´s more a matter of the overall flow of the album, than a matter of how the individual tracks sound.

Compared to "Eaten Back to Life (1990)", Cannibal Corpse did to my ears lose a bit of their charm on "Butchered at Birth", especially because of the unintelligible one-dimensional vocal delivery, but in other ways "Butchered at Birth" is a more professional and consistent album than the debut and a 3.5 star (70%) rating is ultimately deserved.
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