If you are a real fan of suffocation or you just enjoy the vibe of the rock and metal concerts and festivals, this year will be perfect for you. Suffocation is on their great tour around the world and Europe in particularly visiting Czech Republic, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, The UK, Slovenia, Austria and Belgium as well as The USA and Canada. The list of the countries the band is going to perform this year is as long as fourteen whereas the total number of concerts they are planning to give is sixty one!
This article will help you to remind yourself of the fantastic career of this band!
The start of the career
They started off jamming with the influence of the 80s thrash metal and the early death metal scene. Soon, in 1990, the band decided to hire Terrance Hobbs to become its guitarist, as well as Doug Cerrito on another guitar, Mike Smith on drums. By the way, Mike Smith is a killer multi-instrumentalist and back at the time he was playing with other bands including Mortuary, albeit Mortuary had already been disbanded by the time Mike Smith joined the Suffocation band.
The influences of Suffocation
This formation begun to define a new mad house sound which will later pave the sub-genre of death metal. To be precise, the richness of the sounds created by the band was a combination of the music typical for such subgenres of death meatal as technical death metal along and brutal slam metal. The Suffocation’s musical influence was derived from such bands as British death metal band, Napalm Death, various American death metal bands of the time, as well as the Brazilian doom and thrash well-known giant of trash which is undeniably Sepultura.
They started jamming and writing songs that were already creating buzz on the local scene. Both Mike Smith and Terrance Hobbs were black and at that time, it was pretty unusual to find a black man playing such heavy music. In fact, this is how Mike Smith describes the first meeting with Terrance Hobbs as he was surprised to meet another black person playing the music of that genre. This is because, this was the time when the majority of black people had been growing their own subculture with hip hop and R&B music.
Cooperation with Relapse Records
They soon got a deal with Relapse Records, which were an independent record label from Darby, Pennsylvania. Suffocation signed under this label along with the bands like Deceased, Incantation who were other examples of the top extreme metal bands of that time. With this, Suffocation became one of the first three bands to sign under this newly found record label.
By the time, Suffocation had already finished writing the songs for their first EP called ‘Human waste’ which then was released by the label Relapse Records in 1991. After that they began to work on their full-length debut album which would then be listed as one of the most influential albums when it comes down to the genre of death metal and specifically to the technical death metal and slam genres.
The debut album of Suffocation
The band finished writing materials for this album and called it ‘Effigy of the forgotten’. This album was released in the same year of 1991 but with the record label Roadrunner Records. Their sound was greatly shaped and produced by Scott Burns, the producer for the album, at Tampa’s Morrissound Studios. Scott Burns did a great job putting all of their sound together and making it as detailed and controlled as possible with the gears he had at his disposal. The whole sound production for the album was way ahead of the time. This alone helped Suffocation meet their artistic needs and express as much as they wanted their sounds to be like.
The whole sound, complex song writings, crazy playing of the time signature, heavily down tuned guitars, mad paced drumming, intensively low growling vocal altogether found in this album left the blueprint for what is later was the desired effect of almost every extreme metal band. This album still leaves people in awe or disgust. Yes, the disgust is another possible reaction since most people cannot digest this kind of music. In fact, the dedicated, suffocated ones, meaning their die hard fans have difficulties keeping the pace with their lyrics since the vocal may come as impossibly incomprehensible.
There are still people reviewing this album on the Internet. YouTube alone would be the best place to dive in if you want to see people’s reaction to this band.
The second album of Suffocation
Suffocation released their second full-length album called ‘Breeding the spawn’ in 1993. The album could not leave the remark as remarkable as ‘Effigy of the forgotten’ due to its production. Supposedly, during this time the band had tight budget and were heavily in financial difficulties. Yet, their characteristic sounds and song writing is still prevalent in this album. If you dig into old school music and not be so cliché about the quality of the sound production, you will still love this album.