Band:	Six Feet Under
Album:	True Carnage
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	August 2001

01. Impulse To Disembowel
02. The Day The Dead Walked
03. It Never Dies
04. The Murderers
05. Waiting For Decay
06. One Bullet Left [feat. Ice-T]
07. Knife, Gun, Axe
08. Snakes
09. Sick & Twisted [feat. Karyn Crisis]
10. Cadaver Mutilator
11. Necrosociety

Right off the bat, one thing was clearly evident: Six Feet Under weren's out to amaze anyone with speed and technicality with this record. True Carnage is all about straightforward, heavy music. The guitars chug along nicely, Barnes is once again seeing how low it's humanly possible to growl, and the drums fit quite nicely. It's an album full of slow and groove-laden songs. I know, you're probably thinking ?Slow, huh? Boring!? right about now, but the truth of the matter is that the slow speed here is actually their greatest asset, because it allows the music to be truly heavy. So many death bands right now are so bent on being as technical and as fast as possible, that while still ultra-brutal, their music loses much of it's heaviness. They make me feel more like I'm being shot at from a fairly good distance with low-caliber machinegun than at point blank range with shotgun. Taking the opposite route was a very smart decision in my opinion. You might recall another somewhat recent release that did much the same thing: Morbid Angel's Gateways to Annihilation. As you might have guessed from the way I?ve been talking up until now, the music on this album is really quite a bit better than the rating would seem to indicate. Indeed, had it not been for two major gripes, I most likely would have awarded True Carnage a very respectable 9/10.

So, you're probably wondering what those gripes are. Well, the first of my two complaints is the Ice T rap in ?One Bullet Left?. Now to be honest, once he got going, I really didn's find it all that bad. In fact, I even thought it had a pretty good flow. And this is coming from a guy who hates rap. However, the first 15 seconds or so of it was just horrendous. He was simply not fitting the riff that was being played at the moment. The second of my complaints has to do with the production. The guitars were not mixed loud enough. I want to hear the proverbial wall of guitars, or in this case guitar, singular. However, here, it seems to instead cower behind both Barnes's growls and the drums. The music loses much of its power because of this phenomenon.

Now, truth be told, I also considered taking off another half-point for the gore lyrics, which I generally consider to be quite childish. But then I remembered that gore lyrics are really nothing more than a big joke anyways. And, of course, that this is death metal, which, after all, is often about no more than being as extreme as possible, even if it occasionally means being cartoonish. (I feel the same way about satanic lyrics and corpse paint by the way. I prefer the old, more mature, t-shirt and blue jeans/here's what's wrong with life and society school of thought. But I guess that's just not extreme enough.)

In any case, if you even occasionally get a sweet tooth for truly heavy, headbangable metal, than pick this one up. I think you?ll definitely find that it's worth parting with the measly 15 or so bucks it takes to do so.