Six Feet Under and Embryonic Autopsy – Old-School American Death Metal on the Attack, But With the Handbrake On!
Six Feeet Under, Embryonic Autopsy
Sunday, 14 June 2026, 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Ljubljana // Orto bar // Slovenia
The 2026 concert year is racing toward a frenzied summer peak, with events coming one after another. Our region is packed with them, and it’s hard to keep up with everything on offer — stylistically all over the map. On the very day Six Feet Under came back to Slovenia, some folks headed to Italy and Ferrara for the festival where Megadeth and Anthrax played together, while on the other hand, the good punk rock crowd chose to blow over to Zagreb for the Offspring. Then there were those God-forsaken ‘sleepwalkers’ who find all of the above a bit too soft — they jumped on Six Feet Under down at Ljubljana’s Orto bar.
This, for the record, is the legendary Florida death metal outfit founded by vocalist Chris Barnes after he parted ways with Cannibal Corpse in 1993. What started out as a side project had grown by 1995 into a full-time creative operation, once Barnes received a permanent ejection from Cannibal Corpse — which turned out to be a very good thing. In recent years the band has caught a second wind, after Barnes’s peer and old Cannibal Corpse comrade, guitarist Jack Owen, joined up in 2017. Since then, the band has rattled off three albums in quick succession: “Nightmares Of The Decomposed” (2020), “Killing For Revenge” (2024), and their latest — their fifteenth overall — “Next To Die” (2026).
Six Feet Under brought along on the European tour a supremely well-chosen Chicago death metal outfit in Embryonic Autopsy. You could even call them the highlight of the evening at the Orto bar — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The band is fronted by vocalist Tim King (SOiL, Oppressor) and guitarist Scott Roberts (ex-Otep). They blend old-school American death metal influences with modern technical precision and complexity. They arrived in Ljubljana about a month before the release of their new album “Rise Of The Mutated”, but that didn’t stop them from playing four songs off it. The band opened the evening at eight o’clock. Everything started out smooth as butter. Around the halfway mark, the sound began playing up and the band had to stop and restart a song they’d already played through to roughly a third. Fortunately, Tim King smoothed things over with sharp sarcasm aimed squarely at his bandmates, keeping the mood in the club light even through those awkward moments. It was also noticeable that Tim was getting some pitch assistance from the mixing desk on song intros, which isn’t exactly something to write home about. But okay.
The band is very tight overall. The standout is excellent drummer Marco Fimbres (Oppressor), who impressed with a beautifully dialed-in kit — the snare sounded perfect — and technical polish that crackled with wound-up double bass pedal energy and inventive fill choices throughout. Their drum kit was set up in front of Six Feet Under’s, which meant it was pushed right to the edge of the stage. That left Tim with no room to plant himself at center stage, so he ended up resting his left foot on the bass drum rather than on the monitors like vocalists usually do. As noted — the performance was excellent, the growls phenomenal, dark, brutal, and technically top-notch. But the interruptions kept piling up, until the guys finally cracked in the closing stretch when they tackled Cauterized Womb Impalement and called it short. The logistics fumbled that song twice, and when Scott’s pedal died on them a second time, they decided to call it a night. Still, with their presence and their playing — as much as the circumstances allowed — they made a convincing case. This is a band that will definitely keep brutalizing the galaxy in style.
Most people came for Six Feet Under. And there were plenty of them. For a Sunday in mid-June, the Orto was nicely packed — around 200 heads, all happily surrendering to the rumbling, roaring, and ominous gore-metal carnage coming off the stage. Six Feet Under are a name that, even in their veteran years, is held aloft by the cult records of the nineties. And the faithful got their money’s worth. Five tracks from the debut “Haunted” alone (Beneath a Black Sky, Human Target, Lycanthropy, Silent Violence, Torn to the Bone), opening the show with the “Warpath” classic War is Coming, and seasoned with two “Maximum Violence” cuts (Feasting on the Blood of the Insane, Victim of the Paranoid). Things moved fast. No interruptions. Barnes and crew know what the crowd demands. And the crowd delivered — getting well and truly fired up. Barnes is known for not saying much between songs, typically anchoring himself to the stage solo and barely moving throughout a show. Tonight was no different — he stayed somewhat reserved throughout, though a smile crossed his face several times in the second half, confirming that the energy in the room was the real deal. After two debut classics (Human Target, Beneath a Black Sky), Barnes announced they only had two songs left. But those two weren’t the Cannibal Corpse grenades from his time with his fellow Floridians — Stripped, Raped and Strangled and Hammer Smashed Face — which had drawn quite a few veteran Cannibal Corpse fans to this show, but instead the Six Feet Under classics Human Target and Beneath a Black Sky! Then they walked off. Even though both Cannibal Corpse songs were on the setlist, they didn’t play them. Not good. Why? No idea. Barnes being Barnes, probably.
That’s it, nothing more. An hour and fifteen minutes. No talking, just steamrolling. Song after song. That’s something. Barnes has lost quite a bit of dynamite in his growl over the years. He was getting help from the mixing desk, but you couldn’t miss the contrast between the way the younger Tim King had been thundering off the stage not long before and Barnes’s current form — the growl sounding pretty ragged, spent, and tired. That was salvaged by the quartet of excellent musicians around him, especially the three younger heavyweights: led by Ray Suhy’s wild solos, the explosive right-hand attack of bassist Jeff Hughell, and the precise but devastatingly destructive drumming of newcomer Ruston Grosse. With Owen spending most of the show relaxed in his rhythm guitar role, it was exactly those three younger members who somehow lifted the show to that satisfying level that extreme metal demands on stage. They delivered at their peak, and their contribution in that regard was anything but ignored. To put it plainly: “They’re saving Barnes!”
But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. Or actually, let’s. That Cannibal Corpse ‘ignore’ moment genuinely can’t be counted as a plus. The evening broadly satisfied the appetites of fans who came to enjoy the band’s classic-era material, but it left some stains behind too. The band did deliver a solid boot of brutality — and the gore metal carnage that’s a compulsory entry in the brutal old-school Florida metal catalog — but without the drive of his three considerably younger bandmates in the lineup, Barnes would have gone down across the board. Amen.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Six Feet Under – setlist:
1. War Is Coming
2. Silent Violence
3. Revenge of the Zombie
4. Lycanthropy
5. Torn to the Bone
6. Feasting on the Blood of the Insane
7. Victim of the Paranoid
8. Seed of Filth
9. Death or Glory (orig. Holocaust)
10. Know-Nothing Ingrate
11. Mister Blood and Guts
12. Ghosts of the Undead
13. Human Target
14. Beneath a Black Sky
15. Stripped, Raped and Strangled (orig. Cannibal Corpse)
16. Hammer Smashed Face (orig. Cannibal Corpse)
