Hi-Fi, Brisbane
Saturday, September 13, 2014 :
I can very confidently bet that your Saturday didn’t involve grown men fighting with bunches of celery while a band played a song called ‘F***ed With A Knife’. In all seriousness, who brings celery into a Cannibal Corpse pit?
The night kicked off with Italian outfit, Hour Of Penance, who are an act to keep an eye out for, with blast-beat fuelled mayhem, they gave an intense opening set worthy of a gig itself and well worth checking out.
As Cannibal Corpse took the stage, the pit erupted into a real Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ situation, what this gig may have lacked in numbers, it sure as hell made up for in intensity. By the time those family-friendly classics we all know and love such as ‘Icepick Lobotomy’ and ‘Scourge of Iron’ were trotted out, the nostrils of the audience were under a relentless assault of the smell that comes from combining hundreds of sweaty people, beer and of course, celery.
Props go to singer George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher for his ability to take command of the stage. The guy has a neck that most marathon runners couldn’t even get around and you can tell why when he starts windmilling his hair, even issuing challenges to the audience to “try and keep up”. I tied, failed and am booking a chiropractors appointment as a result.
Fisher also interacted really well with the crowd, albeit in a way only Cannibal Corpse could get away with. A stand-out moment being when he told a crowd member who threw a drink in the air that “I will cut your heart out and serve it your mother”. Ok, so it’s not exactly the typical “I love playing in *insert city*” or “*insert city* is our favourite place to be” scripted dialogue a band will usually mindlessly spew out to a crowd, but this kind of interaction was a least far more entertaining.
Once you get past the imagery and hilarious song titles (Exhibit A: ‘I Cum Blood’) and focus on the band as individual musicians you really appreciate just how incredibly talented these guys all are, the bass player in me was utterly mesmerised by Alex Webster’s spider-like fingers covering the whole fretboard. All night they were tight as tight gets and the only break they took was because apparently, the drum tech farted.
The closing songs included more Christmas-morning ditties like ‘Make Them Suffer’, ‘Hammer Smashed Face’ and ‘Devoured By Vermin’, which also featured Fisher trying to chase down a security guard who got far-too heavy handed with members of the crowd about two feet from me. That security guard should be sending a beautiful gift-hamper to the roadie who stopped Fisher, because I’m not sure getting on the bad side of the front man of the world’s most notorious death metal band and a venue full of its fans is something he would have lived through.
There’s something quite paradoxical about a crowd of people leaving a gig of this nature, with this content having smiles from ear to ear, but that’s how it ended for most. Everyone walked in expecting fast-paced brutality, memorable song titles and an overall sensory barrage and they got it … with bonus celery.
Reviewer: Thomas Peasley
Photographer: Barry Schipplock
[nggallery id = 334]