Review: Cannibal Corpse, at HMV Institute, Birmingham
Police with riot vans, positioned across both carriageways, were forced to disperse large sections of a rowdy crowd who were somewhat the worse for wear following the St Patrick’s Day parade through Digbeth.
But that paled in comparison to the pandemonium that was being unleashed in the bowels of the Institute just yards away.
American death metal doyens Cannibal Corpse had just raised the first of many vicious pits with the opening one-two to the head of Evisceration Plague and The Time To Kill Is Now.
Imposing frontman George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher threw down the gauntlet by urging the audience to “headbang as fast as me... you can try, but you will fail.”
He wasn’t wrong.
When he wasn’t shredding his larynx through the likes of Demented Aggression, The Wretched Spawn and Hammer Smashed Face, Fisher’s head was going round like a Catherine Wheel. That’s gotta hurt.
Main support came from dark lords Tryptikon, the creation of former Celtic Frost leader Thomas Gabriel Fischer.
Their 40-minute four-song set received a rapturous response, especially as two of those performed were covers of CF classics Circle Of Tyrants and Dethroned Emperor.
A man of very few words, Fisher let Goetia and the epic The Prolonging paint his blackened landscape before slipping quietly away into the night.
