Gig Review: Cannibal Corpse @ the Paramount

“No, actually, I’m a plumber!”

The quirky presence of Ace Frehley drives this gig review. The spaceman’s agility as a songwriter is legendary. Whether it was obvious or unintentional, all seven guitarists channeled his influence on stage during a chilly night in Huntington, New York! Now a force ghost in the aurora borealis of our musical heroes, Ace’s legacy will live on in the hearts of rock soldiers forever. I don’t care what kind of fast-paced music you practice, if you grew up with Kiss playing in the background – Ace’s style had some influence on you! Jendell has called you home, Space Ace. The wondrous force of you, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tomas Lindberg will always be with us.

Alright, so. Damn. This gig was punishing! We learned a lesson in violence while attending an outstanding event crafted at the Paramount, as evidenced by Cannibal Corpse, Municipal Waste, Full of Hell, and Fulci! And even more amazingly, this billing pulled off a bloodthirsty 4-for-4 SWEEP of organized musical savagery throughout the evening. In case you haven’t seen either band yet, as this tour has now concluded, I will convince you to see them next time. And you know what? No neck-wrecking night matters if we didn’t keep up the chaos. So the plan for the three hours of ruthless music was for us – the fans – to give all four bands our cutting-edge support, from the circle pitters, the crowd surfers, and everyone in between when the torment began with Fulci at 6:55!

First up on the chopping block was Italy’s Fulci, named after one of the daemons of grisly cinema, Lucio Fulci. Carrying an everlasting appreciation by their compatriots’ gory history, Fulci presented a half-hour ritual of bone-snaping music: the songs opened the bloodletting, the metal zoomies began, and the supernatural quintet delivered in terms of showmanship. Fulci’s three pioneering occultists, Fiore (vocals), Dome (guitar), and Klem (bass) in gruesome harmony, brought twelve audio horror shorts to the gathering, assuring the music with Dome’s second vicious shredder in Ando Ferraiuolo and Edoardo Nicoloso on the drums—a tribute to Fulci that doesn’t just honor the decadent visionary but projects to merge with the visuals. Musically, Fulci exhumes a payback of bloody, disgusting riffs, nasty drumming, deep, dark guttural vocal patterns, and no long-winded stage wraps. The band’s immovable energy is hyper-focused on creating a live-to-clip bloodbath in songs like Human Scalp Collection and Tropical Sun. Fulci in concert brings Lucio Fulci’s cult status to life on stage, gushing with hooks and some of the highlights of Lucio’s beastly feast for the eyes, like Zombie 2 and Duck Face Killings, that’s sure to amuse any horror hound who sees them live. Fulci blends a prideful offering with the seamless aggression of old school death metal, with a sound that is grotesque, unrelenting, and straight to the point. Rolling the credits with Eye Full of Maggots, the testament to an unsettling master of nightmares, prepared a growing multitude of heavy metal maniacs for another inhumane time with Full of Hell.

Fulci

Photo Credit: Andrew Fiero

Hailing from the association of Maryland and Pennsylvania, the touring quartet of the siamese axe-attack of Gabe Solomon, the combined duel vocal terror of frontman Dylan Walker and bassist Sam DiGristine, and the garden of demonic drumming from David Bland called Full of Hell sounded fierce, integrating the fundamentals of hardcore, but is predominantly death metal. The band maintained the swarm of chaos during their ferocious live performance. How Dylan Walker vocally represents Full of Hell provides an addtional layer of entertaining extemity, rampaging on stage, moving around like kid during a sugar high only to get crazier when Sam DiGristine’s low-pitched guttural vocals catches up with Dylan’s high-pitched shrill vocal style, in addition to Dylan making unintelligible noise with his Pipe by Soma Labatory and other noise creation gear, infusing their eclipsed aggression as Gabe and David added to the hellish cocktail with an outburst of rapid riffs and turbulent drumming. Full of Hell has built its reputation on a shredded master plan. Striking hard and striking fast with no room to take a single breath, this band defines a mechanism for its members to explore the short, sharp shocks of punchy music without swelling their style – not easy to sustain, without the use of triggers or a click track. The songs are indeed swift, and feverishly so, exploding throughout a rotten half-hour rapture of what felt like several dozen songs gelling together – Pile of Dead Horses / Kopf Meines Vaters + Digital Prison + Crawling Back to God adding a dark, crumbling terrain to the set’s overarching manifestation of whiplash. Backed by a gratifying drum solo from Mr. Bland towards the end of their set, Full of Hell’s time on stage equated to a skin-peeling ride on the Formula Rossa from Gnawed Flesh. Full of Hell left behind a concourse of damaged eardrums like absolute speed demons as it was Municipal Waste’s turn next to keep the heart-pounding night going before Cannibal Corpse.

Full of Hell

Photo Credit: Andrew Fiero

Up next, the dynamic huddle of the Paramount revisited the eighties meets the electric age, which is undoubtedly still amped up (regardless of whoever decided to dive in the pit), because, holy fuck, was there fun and headbanging to be had getting woken up by Municipal Waste. And, with two diabolical groups pummeling the venue for an hour—not to mention the heat wave that Full of Hell threw us into to the point of sensory overdrive—we knew it was time to run amok via some of the many significant and fast-paced cuts we’ve come to love from Municipal Waste. Take, for example, the intense opener of Unleash the Bastards, where the thrashers, now with their flesh reattached, finally increased the eyewall of mosh pits and crowd surfing in high volumes, under the command of the Waste. So yeah, the Richmond party animals wasted no time flying, which I expected since the last time I saw them supporting Kerry King several months ago at Irving Plaza, but keeping the kegger-made thrash engaging.

Municipal Waste, live, since they’re the mutated head of this four-headed demonic bill is really just about letting their fans consume as many suds and strains of MW approved kinetic crossover in forty-six minutes, sixteen all-out bangers included the jugular sucker punch of Grave Dive, some certified classics of The Thrashin’ of the Christ and Wave of Death, which is when the noxious winds of the mayhem served up as workout for the Paramount’s security as unrelenting as Ryan Waste with Nick Poulos threw down the riffs alongside the double kick bottom end of Land Phil and Dave Witte. Frontman Tony Foresta delivered the punk-like attitude as the Richmond native who helped built an institution of current crossover, grappled the audience by cracking some of the top-shelf jokes and stage banter we’ve come to love from him, which differ but remain somewhat unhinged by the next show, and voiced his appreciation a few times for the Long Island crowd. Oh, and, of course, the band has never been shy about wearing their influences on their sleeve, one being Ace Frehley, dedicating Slime and Punishment to the acclaimed cool-blue member of Kiss. The retroactive moshketeers, the older metal fans, and innocent bystanders always take something away from seeing Municipal Waste, and for the band to deliver the final triple kick with Crank the Heat, The Art of Partying, and for the final few minutes of thieir short, but hardly sweet time arriving for everyone to fuck up Long Island one more time closing with Born to Party — this time as a celebration of the life for the late At the Gates vocalist, Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg, an early endorsee of the band when At the Gates was one of the first bands to take Municipal Waste on tour. Huntington tossed around the Paramount with enough havoc leftover to assure the torturous arrival of Cannibal Corpse.

Municipal Waste

Photo Credit: Andrew Fiero

Still at the top of their game, Cannibal Corpse, a blood-soaked pillar of OSDM, gutted a now demolished horde of vile fans in pursuit of jabbing the Paramount for an hour and then some. And the death metal butchery didn’t let anyone go home without a slipped disc in their neck. This time, they couldn’t help but invite Brandon Ellis on tour to stand in for Rob Barrett to cut down on the ensuing carnage from Erik Rutan, Alex Webster, and Paul Mazurkiewicz to shade in black and red that have filled the pages of metal history as one of the gold standards of wicked music, and how, if there is a science to slashing an audience with stage presence alone and all of the things that compliments it without the use of verbose intermission talk in some sacred proportion of simple speech—George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher is that frontman—this cherished band of ours is still at the bleeding edge of the touring field. In other words, the music speaks for itself, a killer sixteen-song set showcasing both eras of Chris Barns and George Fisher, clear-cut by way of those lava plume moments that burned up the mosh pit at the sizzling start from Blood Blind that kept the bodies moving. Then there’s the fresher gashes Inhumane Harvest, and Summoned for Sacrifice (evidently sounding as violent as the older cuts like the Wretched Spawn), where the heretical liege lords of horrorific music landed a genre-dominating touchdown with an astounding, incinerating, and rigorous headline set.

All indicators—namely, the power of their New York fanbase aided in the demolition—pointing towards the night’s continuous, but combative slam dancing, and, frankly, it felt like seeing Cannibal Corpse in the nineties. Not only was the audience shaking the walls, but the band itself was crunching performing more cruel and downright harrowing songs such as Pit of Zombies and Chaos Horrific to enrich an ongoing and rewarding career further. Cannibal Corpse is transforming into even more of a living, breathing, unkillable force not to be trifled with. Point being, Cannibal Corpse puts on a hell of a performance for a multi-generational metal crowd, blessed and grateful, no doubt, for this band. The less-or-more approach of the barbaric five-piece fully locked-in, where the low-key unification of the band remained ingrained in their spots, with spurts of vigorous headbanging, is effective, and looks good on stage in all the right ways. Their simplistic performative style, combined with a unanimous love for vintage heavy metal, is infectious without looking too primitive. There’s no need for Cannibal Corpse to follow any popular trends. You cannot bang your head or raise your fist in the air, whether you’re in the front row or the back of the upper balcony, while enjoying some bestial music. A Cannibal Corpse gig is thick like Corpsegrinder’s next, heavy, and the overall mood is aggressive like a locomotive going 666 MPH.

As for the rest of the set (especially the classics), it’s the final sixteen minutes that arrived for the strongest of the strong to earn the right to headbang with Corpsegrinder. There were no winners, but the brave participants tried, while Cannibal Corpse fired up the buzzsaws for four more bloody chunks of I Cum Blood, Unleashing the Bloodthirsty, Stripped, Raped and Strangled, and Hammer Smashed Face. They turned in a full-on, ass-kicking time. Not a silent moment went by while Cannibal played. Their acoustics were superb, proving that they’ll never forget their roots. Each song felt like a smack to the skull, balancing intensity with impressive riffs. It’s a fearless execution that proves Cannibal Corpse provides brutal music on their own terms. The four-act spectacle that blazed across the states has now fully chilled out—a tremendous bill also featuring Municipal Waste, Full of Hell, and Fulci. There’s not a ton of touring left in 2025. If you missed this event because you forgot when tickets dropped, no need to worry—part of the appeal of these four road warriors will probably tour America again next year, so if either of them is hitting up a local venue, don’t hesitate to go. So if you’re craving Cannibal Corpse-style destruction, a beer stein full of riffs from Municipal Waste, Full of Hell bringing absolute brutality, or death metal exploitation by Fulci, take your day off to plan your next concert night. We need these bands, especially once the new year changes, and your phone notifications won’t stop pinging. All four groups are 100% worth your time and ticket money.