Producer Erik Rutan (Hate Eternal, ex-Morbid Angel, duh) had a hat trick (a hate trick?) with the last three Cannibal Corpse albums — 2006’s Kill, 2009’s Evisceration Plague, and last year’s Torture — which, if you ask me, are three of the legendary death metallers’ finest recordings. And I know a lot of fans who think they also represent a creative renaissance of sorts for CC… not that they ever fell into a Metallica-sized slump, but I think there are people who really didn’t get on board with the Corpsegrinder era before Kill.

So I don’t think I was alone in assuming that Rutan would be back for their outing… but you know what they say: when you assume, you make an ass out of ume. So Rutan will not, in fact, be manning boards for next CC’s next outing. Founding bassist Alex Webster tells Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles:

“We will see. I really shouldn’t speak about it because we are talking about doing certain things but it might not end up happening. It isn’t solid yet. I could give you a solid answer by like February, but right now I don’t know. But what I can say, is that in February and March and then into early April we will be recording. We are going to go into Audio Hammer Studios and have Mark Lewis produce us. We really like a lot of stuff he’s done. We did three great records with my good friend Erik Rutan, he’s one of the best. We felt like, ‘man, we’ve done three awesome records with him, let’s try doing something different.’ Not because we are displeased with what he’s done – he did a fantastic job – but we just felt like mixing it up. We’ve been working with Erik since 2005. We thought, ‘that’s a good eight years, let’s give Mark a try for a little while and see how that goes.’ He’s killer.”

I’m a huge Rutan fanboy, but I’m also a Cannibal Corpse fanboy and a Mark Lewis fanboy (and, incidentally, Lewis did a stellar job with the most recent releases by former Cannibal Corpse frontman Chris Barnes’ Six Feet Under) and the band’s stance obviously makes sense — a fresh perspective can’t hurt, can it? So I don’t see this as a black-and-white issue like “good news” or “bad news” or whatever… it’s just news. Really, the thing to take away from this is that we’re getting a new Cannibal Corpse album probably sometime next year, and that regardless of anything else, it’s gonna sound great. I’m into it.