POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cannibal Corpse: Unrelenting Thrash

Alternative too tame? Grunge getting old? Welcome to the ever-fascinating death-metal underground, where satanism is old-hat, mass-destruction is yesterday’s news and the spin that makes the children dance in circles belongs to Cannibal Corpse, a death-metal band whose subject matter mostly runs toward excruciatingly detailed descriptions of freshly exhumed women. Singer Chris Barnes’ voice brings to mind a dog with a tight collar; the album covers depict skeletons feasting on entrails. No wonder a Cannibal Corpse T-shirt is the trendiest heavy-metal uniform around.

At the packed, fetidly steaming Cannibal Corpse show at the Troubadour on Friday, linebacker-size skinheads gathered momentum and powered through the crowd like a bowling ball crashing through pins. A Gargantuan bouncer crouched on the lip of the stage and pounded back potential stage divers the way Charles Barkley might reject a sloppily executed dunk. The band flipped its long hair with Rockettes-like precision, and churned out unrelenting but remarkably detailed thrash that veered between a Napalm Death blast-beat and the minor-key gothic bleatings of early Slayer. If electric guitars had been around in Belgium 300 years ago, this could have been a scene out of Heironymous Bosch.

But, for all the gore, all the writhing onstage agony, you always got the feeling that the band was putting you on, that they thought the whole thing was as silly as you did--the show ran to over-the-top “Evil Dead II”-style Grand Guignol . . . nobody’s mind could be that sick.