Cannibal Corpse at the Ventura Majestic Theater almost sounds like a sick joke the first time you say it out loud to a local. Why on Earth would the timid, even-keel Pleasantville of the Central Coast host the most violent, vulgar, visceral death metal band of all time? Perhaps it’s because Ventura locals are, somewhere inside, the most violent, vulgar, visceral metalheads in California.
For the longest time, this sub-species of Californian, geographically isolated on the Central Coast, never felt represented by the events happening locally. So often, concerts in Ventura ranged from reggae to Grateful Dead covers, with their one outlet for heaviness being Nardcore. Now though, with new booking leadership at the Ventura Majestic Theater, a whole new range of heavy metal bookings is on the horizon; including this October 3, 2025 Cannibal Corpse show.
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Cannibal Corpse’s autumn tour in particular brought together one of the most insane lineups in modern metal and hardcore. Bridging death metal, grind, and thrash, bands like awe-inspiring fresh blood Fulci, the animalistic, demonically possessed Full of Hell, and toxified-to-the-teeth party speedsters Municipal Waste rounded out the cannibalistic carnage as the four groups rampaged through the West Coast.
My experiences with Cannibal Corpse have been many, from seeing them demolish Mandalay Bay’s pool stage at Psycho Las Vegas to watching them wreak havoc at The Belasco the last time they toured on a metalcore lineup. One of the most unforgettable experiences I had involving the band was hanging out with a bunch of death metal musicians in a Las Vegas hotel room and asking who they thought was the best death metal band of all time.
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The consensus in that room only required a single word: Cannibal. The choice of Cannibal Corpse as the greatest death metal band of all time seems almost obvious at first thought. They were the band that put the genre on the map simply by having no regrets and no limits on the brutality and offense they were willing to peddle. Even though Possessed and Death created the genre, and maybe bands like Obituary are more revered by younger hardcore kids, Cannibal Corpse separates themselves from every other band simply through the sheer violence and gore their songs and album covers depict.
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Cannibal Corpse doesn’t romanticize violence so much as they depict unimaginable violence in its most raw, unfiltered, and honest form. Like Rotten.com on vinyl, Cannibal Corpse made their bread and butter on songs like “Stripped, Raped, and Strangled” while other bands were singing about zombies. The death in Cannibal Corpse’s variety of death metal is a very real thing, not a fantasy storytelling device. Their death metal is rotting, stinking, decrepit, and ugly. Albums from their early era should make listeners feel almost debased, as if crossing a spiritual boundary out of innocence from which there’s no return.
I remember the first time I discovered Cannibal Corpse, seeing the cover of “Butchered at Birth” and drawing my own version in art class, only replacing the babies with the severed heads of my friends, who knew upon seeing my art that I must have been truly disturbed. Perhaps I take more pride in it now, but back then, among people outside the scene, being into Cannibal Corpse was like masturbating to torture videos or something.
Today though, by some unholy miracle, Cannibal Corpse has been completely accepted by the mainstream. The vibe in the crowd that night might have been harmless, but it was also as normal as if the band on stage could have been Cheap Trick or something. Culture has shifted to the point where extremity has been normalized, and that is entirely due to a few cultural phenomena, chief among them the rise of Cannibal Corpse. For their cultural impact alone, one has to put Cannibal Corpse as the first head on death metal’s Mount Rushmore.
Perhaps wrestling is a better analogy actually. Hulk Hogan didn’t create pro wrestling, but he became synonymous with it as the art form’s face. Cannibal Corpse did just that for death metal, representing the genre to the masses before Death, Possessed, or anyone else. Whether their rise to popularity and iconic status was a result of their Ace Ventura cameo or their mention by Bob Dole, Cannibal Corpse became the artistic meme representing all things extreme.
Now that I’ve explained what Cannibal Corpse means to me by way of what they mean to the world, let’s get into their Ventura Majestic Theater show.
Backtracking a bit, I began my night seeing Fulci, the death metal band on the lips of every scene purist. Formed in 2014 and named after giallo director Lucio Fulci, the band conjures death metal from a deep, dark pit in their stomachs, with guttural growls that sound more hellish than their contemporaries and riffs that effortlessly crush audiences. Their music was punishing, pummeling, and poetic in its ability to conjure the sensation of being knifed to pieces.
related: The Road To Psycho Las Vegas
Second on the bill were Full of Hell, who put on a performance so doggedly insane I thought I wasn’t even watching people on stage. Singer Dylan Walker moves in a spastic, crazed way, choreographed chaos, like an escaped mental patient. The band was so wild, brutal, and devilish they left an impression I still think about without being able to recall a single note I heard.
Municipal Waste can turn any show into a party. After taking a tour through every circle of Hell, the Majestic transformed into a backyard Halloween bash as the stage was decked out in open drums of glow-in-the-dark nuclear waste. With a stage full of shredders, the band woke everyone in Ventura up and forced them to go harder, to prove their heavy metal credentials, before we were deemed worthy of accepting Cannibal Corpse next.
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The band was in rare form, ripping from the moment every member lined up in a murderer’s row, headbanging through every song like berserkers from a distant demon planet. Their set featured mostly Corpsegrinder-era songs, but when they returned to the early stuff, the tracks where Alex Webster’s bass sounds like the decrepit dirge of a crypt keeper’s tendons instead of down-tuned strings, the audience was sent into a foreign state of violence beyond logic, moshing, and mangling.
Top tier mosh pits like those at a Cannibal Corpse show can only be achieved by a handful of bands. Certain artists conjure pits with more flow and poetry to the movement, but bands like Slayer and Cannibal Corpse simply inspire more sheer violence than anyone. Certain unhinged members of the audience abandon any sense of self-preservation at these shows, taking everyone to a higher level of live musical appreciation, not through crowd surfs and headbangs, but by turning themselves into human cannonballs and barraging fellow metalheads with every inch of muscle and bone.
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George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, the face and neck of Cannibal Corpse, has carried the band into the new millennium with a whole new energy they never had before him. Some people may get caught up in his likeability offstage, but onstage he’s an absolute beast. Stoic in his brutality, he commands the stage without wasting time on banter or pleasantries.
Simply put, Corpsegrinder is the Anton Chigurh of death metal, a force of nature. Without having to say much, he lets fortune dictate his victims. With as much sober, quick, no-frills precision as a bolt pistol between the eyes, Cannibal Corpse under their Grinder-in-Arms continues to pump fresh, original life into a classic, iconic band with every album and tour.
If you haven’t seen Cannibal Corpse and have the opportunity to catch them on this tour, do yourself a favor and get demolished by their onslaught while you can. This is the tour if you want to never forget a concert experience.
Words by Robert Shepyer
Photos by Misael Ruiz
