Cancer Christ - God Is Violence Review - Metal Utopia

Band: Cancer Christ
Album: God Is Violence
Label: Seeing Red Records
Genre: Punk
Country: US
Release Date: January 5th, 2024
For Fans Of: Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, Pig Destroyer

Cancer Christ are a young-ish punk band from Los Angeles. Last year’s Satan Is A Bitch EP surprised me while showcasing a young, messy band willing to throw caution in the trash and hit hard with fast, short songs. Their christian imagery plays a prominent role in their music as you may have already known. With their new full-length release and debut full-length God Is Violence, Cancer Christ refuse to change anything that worked on an four-minute EP as they stretch their sound out over twenty-six minutes instead. The results are mixed.

The performances on God Is Violence work as well as on Cancer Christ’s previous EP. The drumming is relentless but doesn’t get in the way, and the guitars play some solid riffs and give the album a jagged edge that is essential to Cancer Christ’s personality. But it’s the vocals that steal the show. The singer’s enunciation is surprising, allowing me to understand far more of the lyrics than I normally would. This ends up being a downside, but more on that later. For now, the vocals deliver a clear and prominent message while elevating the album’s aggression and manic sound.

In terms of songwriting, God Is Violence jumps out of a plane without a parachute and tries to stab the ground with a machete. While I don’t enjoy all of the choruses on God Is Violence, despite Cancer Christ repeating them until I’ve memorized them, the band is at minimum able to write a catchy and clear hook. Songs line up, hit the listener in the face, and then leave for the next uppercut from the next track before the listener knows what happened. There are also interludes throughout the album. This would normally be a problem, but with Cancer Christ they serve as a nice breather between over the top anthems about the size of Jesus’s cock and feces baptisms. I can’t avoid the lyrics anymore, so let’s address them.

The lyrics on God Is Violence are bad. They’re really bad. Not a reason to avoid financially supporting the band if you otherwise enjoy this, just bad. Maybe other metal bands are writing worse lyrics, but many of them have the saving grace of me not being able to understand a word they’re saying. Here, when the singer is proudly proclaiming that Jesus had a big ol’ cock and repeating it over and over in case you missed the first fifteen times, there’s no avoiding it. I think songs like “God Hates Cops” and “God Bless The Rapists” are supposed to be subversive and taking shots at a hypocritical religious right that spreads hatred, but the framing here makes this closer to an edgy twelve-year-old on reddit circa 2010 telling dead baby jokes than any sort of real condemnation or knifing of real world issues. And maybe edgy twelve-year old is all that the band meant for this to be. I don’t know. It’s not necessarily worse than something like Cannibal Corpse.

But to be blunt, Cannibal Corpse has better riffs and a better ability to be tongue-in-cheek than Cancer Christ (at least in the Corpsegrinder era). Satan Is A Bitch worked partially because it was so short. At a full-length size, Cancer Christ’s lyrics eclipse their songwriting and take the album into the realm of novelty jokes. The repeated choruses and riffs aren’t good enough to support this level of cringe lyricism, and the lyrics aren’t daring or scalding enough to really hold their own weight. The result is an album that quickly becomes more annoying than interesting.

Through it all, though, the band does maintain their energy. God Is Violence isn’t irredeemable, and if the lyrics weren’t so irritating to me I’d have a better time with an overly-aggressive mediocre-to-good crossover album that at worst has big headbanging moments over distorted, messy guitars every few minutes. And to their credit, nothing about this is as awful or cringe as half the nazi trash that sucks up so much space. These songs aren’t offensive or harmful as far as I can tell, just blemished.

Cancer Christ brand themselves as more of a live band, and I can see it. They’re jagged approach to punk sounds disheveled without sounding sloppy. If it wasn’t for the lyrics I’d be able to enjoy the aggression more, but as it is I just can’t take this album anymore. At least Satan Is A Bitch continues to be entertaining. I’m sure that Cancer Christ will give more good music in the future. But God Is Violence ends here for me.

Rating: 3/10

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