Cancer - "Black Faith", 1995 Let's face it: Cancer is an honest band, but it never excelled at anything. The band’s thrashy death metal formula worked well enough on the first two albums, especially thanks to Scott Burns’s production, and "The Sins of Mankind" was a more polished, technically accomplished effort with better songwriting. That said, I own all of these records and play them occasionally, but I would not include any of them in a hypothetical best-of list of my favorite death metal albums. Therefore, it was a bit of a shock in 1995 when I found out the band had signed to EastWest—the same label as Pantera at the time—and when John Walker appeared on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball to introduce the video for the title track of the band’s then-new record, "Black Faith." I found that single a rather strange departure from the band's signature sound, so I didn't spend my already limited funds to buy the album right away; still, I managed to a...