As some of you know, I’m a DJ at my school’s radio station. The other day I was hanging around the station and chatting with the DJ who was on-air, pretending my finals didn’t exist, when she told me to choose a song for her to play on her show. I immediately reached behind me and plucked Kill off the shelf. Never mind that she was playing All Star by Smashmouth – flow and probable audience be damned, Kill deserves to be played on every show on every radio station across the country and the world.

This album was aptly named – it kills. It shreds, it beats you into submission and then rips out your heart and eats it for good measure. Its murderous intentions are made known immediately, with The Time To Kill Is Now unleashing its fury upon the unwary listener with George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher letting loose a high-pitched, tortured scream over a pounding, driving riff from Pat O’Brien and Paul Mazurkiewicz’s unrelenting drumming. The intensity never lightens; there’s not a truly calm moment to be found anywhere. However, that doesn’t mean we’re subjected to repetitive, lightning-fast songs all the way through, nor is Kill entirely devoid of melody. It’s an insidious brand of melody, found buried deep within the song structures, that helps them ram their way into your brain and stick there. The songs are chock full of interesting riffs that never overstay their welcome; just when the first is starting to lose its potency, the next comes in to continue your punishment. Necrosadistic Warning is the best example of this; it starts off with a short intro that builds into a frenetic storm of a rising and falling riff, more intensive drumming, and Corpsegrinder’s clear but evil vocals. This gives way into a slightly slower, more deliberately pounding riff and thinner drumming, which then suddenly grinds to a halt and rests for a beat – until the frenetic riff comes back to reap your flesh and soul.

Quite a few of the songs on Kill take this same approach. Make Them Suffer opens with a rolling, diving riff that swifty mutates into something more frenetic; the drums and bass suddenly drop away to leave O’Brien hanging in open air, but then return and mutate again into a more deliberate chorus that forces you to headbang. Murder Worship pulls this same trick; pound the listener until they’re off-kilter, then yank the floor away. It makes up for that disorientation, though, with its rolling, deliberate ending. Maniacal also does something similar, though instead of dropping away, the guitar, drums and bass unite to form a few measures of a sonic hammer. Five Nails Through The Neck comes in with a lower, driving riff and short, staccato vocals, which again suddenly drop back into a slower, more deliberate chorus. An almost lazy riff takes over for the last half of the song, as if it’s aware your flesh is now broken and at its tender mercy; O’Brien’s ending solo finishes the gory job.

This is not to say that every song throws tempo changes and unexpected effects at you. There’s plenty of good, simple brutality to be found in songs like Death Walking Terror and Barbaric Bludgeonings. However, the complexity of most of the other songs means that the simpler ones fade into the background more easily; what would be an excellent song becomes merely good in comparison; although they’re not exactly forgettable, theirs are not the titles that will jump to mind when thinking of Kill.

Speaking of titles, any discussion of Cannibal Corpse would be remiss if it did not take a moment to glory in the wonderfully, graphically over-the-top nomenclature. Brain Removal Device and especially Submerged In Boiling Flesh, in addition to being excellent songs, bear the distinction of having some of the best titles I’ve seen so far this year. The closer, Infinite Misery is also titled well, though more because the title fits the song so perfectly. It’s an instrumental which evokes nothing so much as a damned soul’s fall into Hell. It opens with a descending, sliding note that sucks any hope you might have had for mercy out of you, and casts you down with another descending riff that settles into a slow, relentless groove like the endless pitchfork-pokings of demons. It finishes with another solo that floats over top, which is, of course, the wailings of the doomed souls, eternally twisting in the flames.

Simply put, if you’re a death metal fan, this is a mandatory purchase for 2006.