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I fucking love Cannibal Corpse, and it pisses me off when people shun them due to their popularity. Mini outburst aside, Torture is Cannibal Corpse's bloody twelfth full-length. As with the last two or three albums the band haven't really added anything new to their sound, but as far as I'm concerned they don't really need to. Corpsegrinder and the boys have continued to hone in and refine their sound, to the point now where it's business as usual, it's just very fortunate business as usual results in complete massacre. Time to ready the neck-brace...

Gut-busting riffing, Slayer-style breakdowns, lunatic trem riffs, powerful growls, chest-smashing drumming, and spleen-rupturing bass guitars; everything you would want from a Cannibal Corpse album is here in spades. Tracks such as "Sarcophagic Frenzy" and "Encased in Concrete" are perfect examples of the modern day Cannibal Corpse sound, and both smashing examples of US death metal, and to an extent the brutal strand of the genre. There's a nigh on surprise in "Followed Home Then Killed" that merges a creepy atmosphere with some This Godless Endeavor style bad-assery, making for an undoubted highlight. The following "The Strangulation Chair" stands as another highlight, with some mind-ruining guitar riffs, and is generally just an awesome cut.

The album isn't without flaw, with "Scourge of Iron" being a little too heavy on the groove, which does disrupt the flow early on. I also think they could have snipped a couple of minutes here and there, maybe down to a nice 35-40 minute affair, although that really is nit-picking. All in all, Torture is an ace album by one of the genre's masters. Fans of the band are going to love this, and most level-headed death metal fans will get a fair amount of mileage here. If you're the type to focus all your efforts on finding the most obscure, underground death metal which really just sounds like a poor man's version of this band then you know where the door is. Recommended!