METALTALK • MAY 2021
CANNIBAL CORPSE
ALEX WEBSTER Since their 1990 debut album ‘Eaten Back To Life’, Cannibal Corpse haVE been at the forefront of the Death Metal scene as true innovators, who have become the best selling Death Metal band of the Billboard Soundscan Era in the process. Now in 2021, their brutal legacy continues to grow with the release of their fifteenth studio album VIOLENCE UNIMAGINED. On 16 April, the band released their fifteenth studio album Violence Unimagined via Metal Blade Records. MetalTalk spoke to Alex Webster, cofounding member, songwriter and bassist for the legendary band about the making of the album. MetalTalk: I am curious if you have a general process that you follow when writing songs with each album, or is it different depending on the situation? Alex Webster: You know, lately it has been kind of the same the past two or three albums, where I get an idea “ok, I am going to write four songs for this album”, and each of these have to be different. How can I make them different from one another? So I’ll start out by picking a tempo, usually just to kind of break the ice with the writing. Maybe 200 BPM or something, and then pick a scale I might want to start with the riff, and then pick a rhythmic idea. Maybe the song will be in 5/4 instead of 4/4, something like that and just
kind of dig into that way. So if that all works out, I’ll have a song written in a few weeks or whatever, and when it’s time for the next one, I’ll be sure to not use the same tempo, rhythm or scale, with the goal being to make sure that my songs that I contribute to the album are quite different from each other. I feel like that is a key thing in making a great album, is having each song be pretty different. Obviously, the lyrics and imagery are a big part of Death Metal in general and you are a big horror movie fan. Were there any specific movies or anything that inspired the lyrics that you wrote? Or is it just at this point, you have this well of movie knowledge and inspiration from other sources, that you are just sort of “well that sounds cool”? Yeah, it is more that actually. A lot of times I will start writing something, come up with an idea and about half4
way through I will sort of remember, “oh this is kind of like this movie”. Like for example, Surround, Kill, Devour. I started writing that, and actually part of the inspiration for that was a pretty well publicized news story from last year. Some wolves actually surrounded an elk and ate it up at a national park. Just the idea that teamwork, the song is not about wolves [laughs], it is about human cannibals. But just the idea of that very primitive but effective teamwork that wolves and other animals utilize. That was the inspiration for that song. So there was that little element, “ok, this is going to be about some postapocalyptic cannibals hunting people”. And it occurred to me while I was writing that this is kind of like The Road too. Inspiration is not always as direct as would be assumed, I guess. I don’t remember ever sitting down and being like “I’m going to write a song about this movie.” It has never been like that for me. There is, you know,
