Vile is the fifth studio album by American death metal band Cannibal Corpse, released on May 21, 1996 through Metal Blade Records. It is their first album to feature vocalist George Fisher and the last album featuring guitarist Rob Barrett until 2006's Kill. It was also the last Cannibal Corpse album to feature Scott Burns as producer. The album was re-released in 2006 with new liner notes and a bonus DVD (titled "Vile Live") featuring a full concert from the Vile tour, during which many songs from the album are performed.

Musical style

Vile is the band's first album to use Bb standard tuning, as opposed to Eb standard tuning on all prior releases (although a few of the album's tracks are in Db standard). Vincent Jefferies of Allmusic noted Vile's album art and song titles, while "gruesome and extreme to the max", are "toned down" in comparison to previous releases by the band.

Background and recording

Vile was originally titled Created to Kill (which is featured in the Cannibal Corpse Box set) and had partially been completed with Chris Barnes on vocals. Before the album was released, Barnes was dismissed from the band due to creative differences. To replace Barnes, the band hired Monstrosity vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher to re-record the former's vocal tracks, with the rest of the band sharing duties rewriting the lyrics. Webster commented, ""Half the reason that we asked Chris to leave was because a lot of the stuff he’d come up with.. If we’d left it on, the album would not have sounded as good. That’s our firm opinion, and we wouldn’t have kicked him out if we hadn’t thought that the album would have sounded as good. So when it came time, we thought ‘well we have to make sure these lyrics are killer’. Not just a killer read, so much as they just sound good with the music [...] I think a lot of the problem was that Chris didn’t practise with the band too much, that he didn’t really pay attention to the riffs, and he would just write stuff that went over the top of it instead of actually working with it. And now that the band is helping write the lyrics, I think that you can hear that they mesh better."" Fisher recalls feeling extremely nervous during his first vocal tracking sessions with the band. He said, "It felt like the world was finally gonna know who I was and I’d wanted that for so long. But I remember that I lost control of my voice at first and could see the guys in the control room looking like ‘did we make the right choice?’ and I was nervous. I went into the bathroom and told myself ‘you know you can do this, so do the damn song’. Rob had pushed so hard for me to join, like ‘George is the only guy that can do this’ and that first scream you hear is the first one I did when I walked back into the room." During the Vile sessions, "The Undead Will Feast" from Eaten Back to Life was re-recorded with Fisher on vocals. This version of the song would first appear as the only bonus track on a Japanese import edition of Vile and then on the Worm Infested EP in 2003.

Reception and legacy

Allmusic wrote "Fisher brought a vocal dynamism and character that livened up the band's six-year-old sound. Fisher's ability to match the musical intensity and rhythm of Vile's more complicated assemblages of riffs created a more sophisticated yet equally tortuous essence." Vile was the first death metal album to appear on the Billboard 200 chart, debuting at No. 151.

Track listing

Personnel

Cannibal Corpse

Production

2007 Vile Live DVD track listing

February 3, 1997

February 4, 1997

Created to Kill

Several of the songs from the finished album were written while Barnes was still in the band, and were recorded in demo form with his vocals. These tracks were collected for disc three of the 15 Year Killing Spree box set. They are:

Chart positions