Suffocation - Human Waste
Review: A glimpse into the formation of death metal comes from the experience of seeing this fusion of grindcore and simple death metal unfold into its rhythmic promise of complexity mated with its unswerving ability to bring death metal's nihilistic blast of chromatic power chords into a stream at once both obsessed with its default valuelessness and its building romance of architectural, energetic, fearless response to the void of life. Suffocation meld the emotions of hardcore and extreme avantgarde metal into a contexture of intricate conflicting structures through absorption of both to the ultimate abstract at the same time they are rendered incarnate in pummeling, concrete, functional rhythms.
Guttural vocals base their power on the rhythm they gain from recursion and iambic synchronicity, chugging into drumbeats fashioned from primal divisions of the human sense of time. Over that shuddering waves of power chords and arpeggios build multiplicative structures from the simple directions of nihilistic chromatic music, taking it from literal riffs in the tempos of human motion to vast mysticisms of scientifically derived, directed thought process; like most death metal, any power or beauty is so buried in the abstract that aesthetics fail to describe, but like most punk music, the living pulse infuses all of the music with a breathing relevance that few can deny.
One of the first bands to break apart song structures with blast beats and layered rhythms, Suffocation massacre their song structures with deconstructionist reliance upon bridge passages which link recombinant mutable riffs into cyclic architectural turnarounds. Lead guitar is the deadly serious satire of rock n roll that brings apart the ludicrousness of the scale into an obscurity-affirming chaotic, noisy swirl, but does not serve as a unifier so much as an accelerator to these rapid and insanely ambitious complex riff collages. From speed metal comes the chugging, muffled-strum power chord arpeggio constructions and from basic death metal the ripping single note or chord melodies, but from punk music comes the energetic tempo ride that grips each song to itself with bonds of compelling urgency.
Originators and still induplicable, Suffocation bashed out the beginnings of death metal's most visible style, the "New York" combination of blasting grindcore beats and metallic textures through the course of complex and unrelentingly savage songs. On this their demo and first (EP) release, careful listening brings about a renewed appreciation for death metal in substance and ideology, as one can see the authentic development of its paradigm of articulation from the promising but unresolved roots of its ancestry.