CANNIBAL CORPSE Guitarist Talks 'Torture' In New Interview

Simon Crampton of ThisIsNotAScene recently conducted an interview with guitarist Rob Barrett of Florida death metal veterans CANNIBAL CORPSE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ThisIsNotAScene: It's been three years since the release of "Evisceration Plague". How would you say CANNIBAL CORPSE has developed as a band in that time?

Rob: Well, I think the chemistry of the band has developed over the last two albums after I came back into the band in 2005. It's been seven years now since we did "Kill". During "Kill" and "Evisceration Plague", we were working on the chemistry of the five of us together and this is the third album with this lineup now, so I think we have got to a point where the chemistry has developed to its best point; now we're all writing songs to a point where we're keeping each individual in mind, as opposed to before where perhaps we were writing whatever we wanted to play and weren't really keeping into consideration what anyone else was going to play kinda thing.

ThisIsNotAScene: So "Torture" was more of a band effort then?

Rob: It was definitely more of a group effort.

ThisIsNotAScene: Did you have any specific topics in mind when you wrote the album?

Rob: When we were thinking about potential album titles and ended up agreeing on the "Torture" title, that pretty much gave us a focus of what we were going to write all the lyrics about. Each song deals with some sort of form of different torture. It just made sense to us, it was a cool topic and it fits into our style of writing, so that's how it came out.

ThisIsNotAScene: After so long together as a band, is it easier to write new material or do you find it harder now to write new music?

Rob: It's actually better and easier than it's ever been, really. Like I was saying about the whole chemistry thing, now I think we're all comfortable and we have a better understanding of what each individual's strength's and weaknesses are, which allows to write songs that we can all perform well, rather than have a lot of songs that were really difficult for one or two of us to play.

ThisIsNotAScene: What is it that keeps you excited as a musician about writing music and moving forward?

Rob: It's just like a blank piece of paper; you can write anything on there and that's the exciting thing. Whatever catches your interest, anything that comes to mind that works within the confines of the band, that is the exciting thing. You can pretty much do whatever you want with music.

ThisIsNotAScene: You guys have released a track from the album already called "Demented Aggression". Would you say that track is fairly indicative of the rest of the album or is that more of a standalone track?

Rob: In my opinion, that one stands on its own amongst the other songs, that one is just pretty much just straightforward traditional style riffing, nothing too complicated. It's just a straightahead fast song. There's a lot of songs on here that you'll be hearing that are have a lot more technical stuff going on that are more involved. What I like about "Demented Aggression" is that it is very basic. I think it's important for us to keep writing primitive style songs like that.

ThisIsNotAScene: Obviously, CANNIBAL CORPSE is no stranger to controversy and you have more than your fair share over the course of your career. ThisIsNotAScene: Do you find that the longer you've gone on as a band that people have become more tolerant of you as a band.

Rob: Oh yeah, of course. I think a lot of people get it now and know that we aren't out to influence people to do what we're talking about in our lyrics and we're doing it out of pure entertainment purposes. There are always going to be detractors, if you want to call them that, and they will always have something negative to say about what we do, but we're not really trying to cater to those people and we have a really good fanbase, and we want to keep our fans happy. The controversy thing was nothing we pre-planned, like, "Hey we're going to do this to offend these people." We just do what we think is interesting.

Read the entire interview from ThisIsNotAScene.