Hammer Smashed Face (Hammer Smashed Face - Cannibal Corpse)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Hammer Smashed Face - Cannibal Corpse
Date:	11/04/08 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cannibal Corpse's good song, and some okay covers.

Disadvantages: Unremarkable performance.

'Hammer Smashed Face' is really the only Cannibal Corpse song anyone needs to hear, easily the band's best and one of their relatively few successful attempts to combine extreme (albeit indecipherable) gore lyrics with some solid death metal. The speed changes are enjoyable at first, before the predictable slips back into the slower groove become a little tiresome, and the guitars are hardly original, but it's still an enjoyable and important piece of death metal history, even if Cannibal Corpse have never been a particularly strong band even at this peak of their career.

That brings us on to the remainder of the E.P., which is comprised of pretty good cover songs rather than original material, and for this reason is a lot more entertaining. Rather than go for some novelty covers that would only lessen my opinion of the image-centric band even further, they tackle an early death metal song from genre pioneers Possessed and do a wholly adequate job; with its frequent, high speed guitar solos and relentless pace, it serves as an example of what Cannibal Corpse could have been if they'd decided to concentrate a little more on the extremity of their music rather than relying too greatly on vile lyrics.

By contrast, the final song 'Zero the Hero' is a cover of Black Sabbath, and although it's fair to say the band butchers it to an extent (as almost any band attempting to cover Sabbath manages to, with only a couple of notable exceptions), its steady groove is the perfect counterpart to the previous song. The death metal take on Tony Iommi's riff is nothing special, but still instantly recognisable under the dark production values, and the only real issue here is the inferiority of Chris Barnes' gurgle to Ian Gillan's original hard rock wail. A nice little fifteen-minute E.P., but one that mainly serves to prove that Cannibal Corpse have only ever produced one worthwhile song.

1. Hammer Smashed Face
2. The Exorcist (Possessed cover)
3. Zero the Hero (Black Sabbath cover)

Summary: Cannibal Corpse's first E.P. (1993).