Death metal merchants Cancer have never had a particularly easy ride of it, having broken up twice since their 1988 inception. Following a successful reunion in 2013, which yielded the excellent Shadow Gripped album in 2018, the band have, once again, gone through a period of turmoil, the bulk of the band departing in the seven long years since that album, leaving only vocalist / guitarist John Walker remaining. If the incoming members had any reservations about stepping into the fold, you’d certainly not know it from their performance here, with Gabriel Valcazar (drums), Daniel Maganto (bass), and Robert Navajas (lead guitar), doing a solid job of augmenting Walker’s menacing presence. The resulting album, Inverted World, is a concise, ten-track album deftly mixed by V. Santura – the dark figure behind the likes of Tryptikon, Pestilence. Happily, for those who have remained faithful to this most turbulent of bands, it has proven to be worth the wait.
The album opens with the stunning Enter The Gates, a toxic slab of unreconstituted death metal delivered with coldly calculating proficiency and malicious intent. From the stair-stepping riff that kickstarts the track, to Walker’s doom-laden rasp (which now sits somewhere between John Tardy and Nick Holmes circa Gothic), it’s a gloriously old school blast of necrotic death metal, and it sets the scene for the album perfectly. Retaining the power, but ratcheting up the pace, the splenetic thrash of Until They Died provides an impressive overview of Gabriel’s skills behind the kit, providing the perfect backdrop for Walker’s horrifying tales of wartime massacres. Delivered with blistering clarity, ensuring that you take in every spat-out lyric, it builds to a frantic solo that leaves you gasping for air.
Despite the ferocious opening, the title track offers no respite, crashing into the listener like a hail of bullets. With the stabbing riffs and dense percussion once again rendered with impressive intensity, it’s a masterclass in studied intensity, with the new line up clearly revelling in a dark musical chemistry. With the album racing past, the savage 39 Bodies develops quite the groove, the acid-etched vocals once again recalling the dark majesty of early Paradise Lost. The first half then wraps up with the frantic Test Site, which digs into the murky world of nuclear testing, before devolving into a complex mess of pummelling percussion and Kerry-King-esque lead, providing a fair sonic approximation of the blast zone.
Opening the second half, Amputate may start out its life as gnarly proto-thrash, but it soon slows to a crawl, as Walker draws the listener into an unholy world of colonial oppression and slavery. Once again, V. Santura places the vocals firmly front and centre, ensuring that you can’t look away even if you want to. It’s followed by the lengthy When Killing Isn’t Murder, which finds the band edging into death-doom territory, the track reaching a peak when a deftly harmonised lead drives it firmly over the top. As if worried that the listener had had just a little too much time to recover their shattered senses, Cancer next unleash Covert Operations, a frantic track that recalls the likes of Sepultura’s Propaganda in terms of sheer speed and dexterity. The hypocrisy of religion comes under the lens next, as the band unveil another mini epic in the form of Jesus For Eugenics, which adds acoustic guitars to the mix, providing just a touch of light amidst the dense, deathly shade. Interestingly, the opening bars cleave closer to Fields Of The Nephilim than your typical death metal, but the harder riffs aren’t too far behind, and there’s one hell of a solo waiting in the wings. The album wraps up with Corrosive – arguably as much of a description as a title – and it finds Daniel, a fiendish grin on his face, unleashing a bass riff of monumental proportions. A fitting conclusion to the album, it sees Cancer edge just a touch of scuzzy punk into their dark ‘n’ dirty death metal with impressive results.
Clearly seeing no need to reinvent the wheel, Cancer are back doing what they do best, and they do it very well. The new line up slot in as if they’ve always been there, spurring mainstay John Walker to deliver a tight and engaging performance that keeps the listener firmly pinned against the wall and more than a little afraid for their physical safety. With tracks like Corrosive and the epic title track vying for your attention, it’s clear that Cancer remains a force with which to reckon. For those looking for a concise blast of old school death metal, Inverted World will be right up your grimy alley. 9/10
