Cannibal Corpse: Keeping The Gore In The Metal

07/14/06 10:30am

by Andre Mihsin (CHARTattack)

The Sounds Of The Underground tour may be a step down for the bands on this year's bill who've done Ozzfest and other high-profile tours. However, for Cannibal Corpse, these will be some of the biggest crowds they'll get to play for in North America. We caught up with bassist/lyricist Alex Webster to talk about this year's tour as well as one of the band's more unlikely fans.

ChartAttack: Why did you guys choose to do the Sounds Of The Underground tour this year?
Alex Webster: They approached us about it, but we'd also been interested in doing it for a while because we've only done two tours in North America where we weren't the headliner. Our very first tour back in 1992 was a headlining tour over Atheist and Goreguts so we have really been looking for an opportunity where we can open for bands that are more popular than us and that opportunity has finally come. We can play in front of a bunch of fans that had never heard us before or know very little about us or who normally wouldn't go see us play. The most enjoyable way to tour is to headline because you're playing for all your fans and you get to play for a long time. But we do need an opportunity like this to once in a while introduce ourselves to a few new people that are into certain types of extreme music but they don't know that much about death metal and this is our opportunity to show them what we're all about.

Who are you looking forward to seeing?
Definitely Behemoth. They're the band that stylistically is closest to us and we've never toured with them before. I've seen them play once and it was really good. So we're psyched about playing with them, and Gwar, a legendary, classic live band, so that'll be fun. Actually, I want to check out all the bands and see how they are. It's a big variety. I mean you got regular hardcore stuff like Terror or The Chariot. Trivium are really good musicians, I want to see how they are on stage. There's lots of stuff I want to check out on this tour.
I brought my bicycle because we're not playing that long so if we're in a cool area I might go for a ride for a couple of hours and see what's around. Normally we're stuck to the bus because the bus driver has to sleep while we're doing our thing.

That's different. Most people say they'll be drinking or partying.
[laughing] Yeah, I guess I drank more when I was single. Now that I'm married it's not something I do as much.

I read that Jim Carrey's a fan of the band. Tell us about that.
What happened was they were doing Ace Ventura and they needed a band where there would be slam-dancing for this scene. He told us when we came down there and met him that he bought the albums because he thought the album covers look crazy and he wanted to see what it was about. And his first reaction was like, he had to laugh because he never heard anything like it in his life. But then after he listened to it he started to really like it. I don't know how much he listens to it now, but it was his choice to have us there. It was because of him that we got in that movie. Nobody pushed us on him, it was him pushing the people who were making the movie to get us, and so we really owe him a lot because that gave us a lot of mainstream exposure.

As pioneers of the gore metal sound, what do you think the future holds for the sub-genre?
I think that there's always a future for a type of music that attracts good musicians. And a lot of the bands that are playing death metal, not just gore metal, are really great musicians. And having talented and creative people on the scene, it's going to keep this kind of music kind of moving forward.