Six Feet Under
True Carnage
Metal Blade
You’ve gotta hand it to Chris Barnes and Six Feet Under • it takes balls as big as boulders to unleash such potentially “yeah, right” album titles as they do. First there was Warpath, then came Maximum Violence, and now we’ve got the recent True Carnage. But accurate? Uh• yeah, right. Not all that long ago, one particularly astute critic said that Six Feet Under set the death metal genre back about five years every time they release a record, and that sounds about right here, as True Carnage is simplified to the point of being simplistic, hardly the drinking man’s death metal it purports to be like Unleashed’s Victory and Warrior years before or Amon Amarth’s last two records more recently. I mean, things get off to a decent start with doom-fried opener “Impulse To Disembowel,” Ice-T makes an especially profanity-laden cameo on “One Bullet Left,” as does Karyn Crisis on “Sick And Twisted,” but no surprises abound elsewhere other than Barnes’ occasional pig squeals, which are so beyond ridiculous, they’re almost brilliant in a strangely inebriated way. Really, look at it this way: Six Feet Under • and True Carnage, in particular • are death metal that’s accessible to the non-metal world due to no small amount of one-dimensional ideas, and any metalhead worth his salt doesn’t listen to Six Feet Under without fear of reprisal, unless they’re diehard Cannibal Corpse fans, who are another (sad) story altogether. Guaranteed to age worse than moldy cheese.
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