Each week, The Perfect Chord looks back at albums you may have missed when they dropped, or miss now that they’ve faded from memory. This week’s glimpse into the crates:
Suffocation – Effigy Of The Forgotten
The early-1990s were, arguably, the most important time for death metal since the subgenre first began budding out of the American thrash metal scene in the early-to-mid-80s. High-profile metal labels Metal Blade secured distribution through Warner Brothers, guaranteeing fans everywhere access to the music, and bands like Deicide, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and, well, Death, all released either debut or definitive albums in or around 1991. The style had spread beyond the U.S. by that point, also, most notably to England (where grindcore/crust punk vets Napalm Death had begun exploring the sound) and Sweden, where bands like Carnage and the Entombed had begun to establish their own sound and identity.
Long Island, New York-based band Suffocation stood out among the mass of bands at the time, largely due to their two Black members: drummer Mike Smith and guitarist Terrance Hobbs. Smith and Hobbs joined vocalist Frank Mullen, guitarist Guy Marchais, and bassist Josh Barohn shortly after the band formed in 1989. Even they noted their uniqueness in the scene—according to Smith, his thoughts upon first meeting Hobbs were “Wow, there’s another Black guy playing this kind of stuff.” The band released their first EP, Human Waste, on Relapse Records in early 1991; that same year, Roadrunner Records unveiled the band’s full-length debut, Effigy Of The Forgotten, which critics and fans alike have noted as a landmark album in the maturation of death metal.
Interestingly enough, Smith’s drums attract the most acclaim when referring to Effigy, and with good reason: the album features the most extensive and definitive performances to that date of what’s known as the “blast beat,” a technique involving precise, blisteringly-fast sixteenth note figures alternating between the kick and snare drums. While the technique certainly existed before Suffocation—indeed, it existed even before heavy metal itself—Smith’s own technical innovations when employing it were distinctive enough to prompt people to credit its invention to him. This isn’t to ignore Hobbs’ contributions; indeed, after joining the group, he became one of the group’s principal songwriters, and was the only member of the band to have at least partial writing credit on all of Effigy’s songs.
Smith begins the album blasting away on “Liege Of Inveracity,” with Hobbs and Marchais shredding their way through the complex arrangement with staggering poise. The song’s style helped usher in the new prevailing trend in death metal; the layered arrangement, with numerous time and tempo changes. “Liege” roars from viciously fast to a slow groove multiple times over the song’s four-and-a-half minutes, and features a particularly blistering Hobbs solo two minutes in. The title track and “Infecting the Crypts” continue with the frantic time changes; the latter features two separate passages clearly reflecting the classical music influences that would also begin to creep into death metal at the time. Later tracks “Habitual Infamy” and “Involuntary Slaughter” stretch the extremes of the band’s time-and-tempo changes, lurching from narcoleptically-slow to grindcore-fast often within the same verse; “Involuntary Slaughter,” arranged entirely by Hobbs, contains one especially thrilling segment in which the song’s tempo changes by syncopating each beat consecutively. “Mass Obliteration” and “Jesus Wept” both begin with D-beat-esque rhythms clearly inspired by hardcore punk rock, at times sounding closer to thrash than death.
The album’s crowning achievement, though, is its centerpiece and longest song. “Seeds Of The Suffering” begins with Smith laying down a D-beat, then quickly breaking it down and re-setting the song, this time leading with a double-kick beat both almost-inhumanly fast and metronomically precise. Hobbs and Marchais’ rhythms dance over Smith’s cymbals as the beat changes nearly a dozen times within song’s first two minutes. The tempo slows two minutes in as Smith lays down a double-kick-heavy blast beat. At the three-and-a-half minute mark, Cerrito and Hobbs begin trading solos, and Mullen affects an even deeper growl than his normal bark. Smith continues to change up the beat, going back-and-forth between single and double-kick techniques, as the song (at nearly six minutes, the album’s longest) races to a halt.
Effigy Of The Forgotten marked the beginning of a deceptively long career for Suffocation. Though Hobbs would play with the band throughout their entire tenure, Smith left the band in 1993, and the band itself broke up in 1998. However, Smith would return when the band reunited five years later and, six full-length albums and twenty-two years after their formation, the band continues to record and perform, including an appearance in a 2007 advertisement for The History Channel’s Dark Ages miniseries. Smith himself has become such an in-demand presence both in the studio and as a composer that he was asked to perform on Roadrunner Records’ twenty-fifth anniversary collaborative effort Roadrunner United, which featured all-star line-ups of musicians from many of the label’s bands; he also appeared on underground rapper Necro’s album Death Rap in a surprisingly-novel fusion of death metal and horrorcore hip hop. Even placed in the context of such a long career, Effigy Of The Forgotten is an unforgettable album, and a great introduction to the world of modern technical death metal.
A. Darryl Moton is a freelance writer/Iowan/curmudgeon driving a bus in Portland, Oregon.
