When Cannibal Corpse bassist Alex Webster sat down for the latest episode of the “100 Songs That Define Heavy Metal” podcast with Brian Slagel, he laid out a pretty relatable path: start with whatever is around the house, find the bands that hit harder, then keep chasing weight and speed until you land in something extreme.
He described that early climb in detail, starting way earlier than most people would guess for a guy best known for some of death metal’s most punishing low end: “Well, when I was really young, single-digit age or whatever, I listened to ’50s rock, like Chuck Berry and Elvis [Presley], stuff like that, records my dad had lying around from when he was a teenager, that kind of stuff, the ’50s rock.”
“But, yeah, I got into just regular rock, like The Police and stuff like that. And then, pretty much around my early teens, that was when metal came in, and then it was bands like Accept and Iron Maiden, those two in particular. And then Metallica, all the thrash bands, Metallica, Slayer, Kreator, all those bands, Megadeth, all that stuff,” he recalled (via Blabbermouth).
“And it just kind of builds up. Metalheads are always looking for the next heavier thing, or the next step forward, and everybody sort of adds to that. So I would say out of the thrash bands, death metal owes the most to Slayer. They were the band that had those kinds of lyrics. I feel like if you’re looking at a family tree, then a lot of death metal comes from the Slayer branch, in a way. And there are other bands too, for sure — Venom, stuff like that. But for us, Slayer is probably the biggest influence of the thrash bands, for sure — Slayer, Kreator, Dark Angel, bands like that,” Webster reflected.
That “family tree” idea lands because it matches how a lot of people actually discover heavy music. You latch onto a couple of gateway records, then you move the needle: faster riffs, harsher vocals, darker lyrics, until the next thing becomes normal. Webster calls out Slayer specifically because the attitude and lyrical violence were already there. For a band like Cannibal Corpse, that bridge between thrash and death metal is a direct line.
Once the conversation shifted to vocals, Webster focused less on one single inventor and more on a chain reaction: singers pushing rougher tones, then the next wave going deeper and more guttural until melody became secondary.
“I really would love it if some of the original death metal and growling kind of thrash metal singers would get together and maybe do a roundtable on the origins of this style of singing or something like that, because I think it kind of starts maybe with Lemmy [Motörhead], who was still singing — Lemmy and Cronos [Venom]; they were singing, but it was getting into a growl, but there were still melodies going on there.”
“And then you get Jeff [Becerra] from Possessed, Chuck [Schuldiner] from Death, Kam Lee from Massacre, people like that, doing something deeper, more guttural,” he added. “And then it just goes on, and on to [where] everybody ended up being pretty guttural and not really having any kind of a melody. There was a point where it was still singing, where you’re carrying a tune, and then it just really became more of a rhythmic growl. And that, I think, it kind of started with some of the really early death metal, of course, like the bands I mentioned, and then also thrash, like Mille [Petrozza] from Kreator was a big inspiration for us as well.”
Plenty of bands stumble into a sound while the scene forms around them. Webster described something more focused: the intention was there from the start, and the map was already drawn by the demos and records they were absorbing.
When asked if forming a death metal band was the goal or if it happened naturally, he said: “When we made Cannibal Corpse, that was the plan. That was 1988, so there were already death metal bands out there that we liked. We had the Morbid Angel demo, and we loved Death. Kreator Pleasure To Kill, to me, that album is sort of — at least at that time, it was very close to being death metal. Same thing with some of the Sodom albums. So when we made Cannibal Corpse, it was pretty clear that we were gonna go in that direction.”
“The band that [ex-Cannibal Corpse guitarist] Jack [Owen] and I were in before was more of a crossover kind of band where it was sort of a mixture of Kreator and D.R.I., that kind of thing. To make a long story short, we had a lot of different sounds, but we were a crossover band, that band Beyond Death, that Jack and I were in before Cannibal Corpse,” Webster mused.
But, yeah, when we made Cannibal Corpse, we were already pretty inspired by bands like Death and Morbid Angel, so we were ready to kind of get going in that direction. And it still took us a little bit of time. But I’d say by the time [Cannibal Corpse‘s 1990 debut album] Eaten Back To Life came out, we were there — you could hear, for sure, that we had thrash roots, but it was death metal right out of the gate.”
Outside the podcast talk, Cannibal Corpse also had a notable live wrinkle this past summer/fall when Brandon Ellis filled in for guitarist Rob Barrett on the band’s U.S. run. The tour kicked off September 15 in Nashville and wrapped October 22 in Charlotte, with Municipal Waste, Full Of Hell, and Fulci providing support on the trek.
Ellis had announced his exit from The Black Dahlia Murder back in February, making his appearance with Cannibal Corpse an extra point of interest for anyone tracking modern extreme metal lineups.
