One structural move, about four bars long, is the reason this record is still being argued about thirty five years after it was pressed. Everything else on it is excellent and almost none of it is unprecedented. The move is: full speed, then the tempo cut in half on a beat nobody signalled, then the guitars and the kick drum arriving on the same sixteenth with silence built around them, and then the song carrying on as though nothing had happened. It has a name now and an entire industry attached to it. In October 1991 it had neither.
What happens in those four bars
The quintet from Centereach who had spent two years building a vocabulary before they could write in it put Effigy of the Forgotten out through Roadrunner on 22 October 1991, and the opening track, "Liege of Inveracity", contains the passage generally treated as the first slam riff committed to a record. Getting there takes ninety seconds of blasting. Then the floor goes. Terrance Hobbs and Doug Cerrito had tuned down to C, then pulled back up to C sharp because, as Hobbs put it to Decibel in October 2021, once a guitar goes that low the string tension becomes impossible to control, and at that pitch a palm mute stops behaving like a note and starts behaving like a hammer landing on wood.
Three things have to be true at once for the effect to work, and this is why so few bands managed it in the years afterwards. The riff has to have more silence in it than sound, so that the impacts read individually rather than as a texture. The bass drum has to be exactly on the guitar rather than around it, which at half tempo leaves nowhere to hide. And the recording has to be dry enough that the stopping is audible, because reverb fills the gap the whole device is made of. Miss one and the passage becomes a slow bit. Get all three and four hundred people move at once.
Anyone can write a fast riff. This record is about the moment the music stops going forward and starts going down.
The idea came out of a hardcore club
Nothing about the device is a metal invention, and the band never pretended otherwise. Long Island and the five boroughs had spent the eighties running the most physical live culture in American music, and the hardcore bands playing those rooms had a fixed contract with the floor: at some point the song would slow and the crowd would be given thirty seconds to do something about it. They called it a mosh part. What Suffocation did was carry that piece of architecture across the fence, weld it to a blast beat and write technical death metal around it instead of hardcore, which is a genuinely strange thing to attempt and explains why the whole of the East Coast scene ended up sounding different from Florida.
The band's stated influences point the same way. Alongside the American death metal of the day they took from Napalm Death and Sepultura, groups whose relationship with hardcore was open rather than embarrassed, and the name itself came off a Morbid Angel song at Frank Mullen's suggestion. Hobbs and Cerrito wrote riffs separately and then spent hours in a room bolting them together, which is audible in the finished songs: they do not develop so much as assemble, six or seven distinct figures per track, each used once or twice and then abandoned.
One week at Morrisound, and no undo
The session ran for about a week in June 1991 at Morrisound Recording in Tampa on a budget of five thousand dollars, with Scott Burns producing and mixing. Hobbs has been consistent about why Burns got the job: he had just finished a record for Obituary, and hiring him was not a decision anybody had to think about. What Burns did with five young musicians was refuse to let them start until the sound was right, sitting them down over amplifiers, pickups and tone before a single take, which is the least glamorous and most consequential thing anybody did on that record.
When it came down to editing, it was tape on the floor. There was no undo.
Terrance Hobbs, Decibel, 8 October 2021
That is worth holding onto when listening to the tightness of the drum tracks. Mike Smith, who had come out of a defunct local band called Mortuary, is playing blasts and half time drops that had to arrive correctly on the take because a wrong one meant a razor blade and a splice. George Fisher, then singing in Monstrosity, walked in from another session in the building and added guest vocals. Dan Seagrave painted the front in England, having already produced the two sleeves that fixed the visual identity of Swedish death metal. None of those people were coordinated by anybody. They were simply all working in the same small trade in the same eighteen months.
The record around the riff
Nine tracks, thirty seven minutes, and no rest written into any of them. "Infecting the Crypts" is the one most bands learned first. "Reincremation" and "Involuntary Slaughter" had both existed as demo recordings before the album took them. "Jesus Wept" closes it. Across all nine, Frank Mullen is doing something that had not been done at length before, driving the voice from the chest rather than the throat and stripping out the consonants that would let a listener track a syllable line, so that the vocal stops competing with the guitars and turns into a fourth rhythm instrument hitting where the kick hits.
The next two records prove how narrow the margin was. Josh Barohn left in July 1991, before the album was even in shops, to join Autopsy, and Chris Richards took the bass. In 1993 Roadrunner would not pay for Morrisound again, Breeding the Spawn was made for less than the music needed and everybody involved has said in print that it does not sound the way it was meant to. Mike Smith left afterwards. It took until Pierced from Within in 1995 for the band to get a recording equal to its writing, by which point the device it had invented was already being used by people who had never heard of Centereach.
What it cost them and what it gave everyone else
The contemporary reviews were split and the reassessment took roughly a decade. Metal Storm eventually gave the album ten out of ten, AllMusic four stars out of five, and Metal Hammer placed it eighteenth in a ranking of death metal albums and called it ground zero for what followed. Three subgenres now trace their descent from it, and none of them agrees with the others about what it means: brutal death metal took the riff arithmetic, slam took the drop and threw the rest away, and deathcore took the drop back to the hardcore that had lent it out in the first place.
Meanwhile the band that built it spent the nineties on tour budgets and bad pressings, stopped in 1998 and started again in 2003. That is the ordinary arithmetic of this music, and it is why the record that changed the shape of extreme metal made almost nobody any money. The album that did make money, in enormous quantities, came out of the other end of the same state eleven months later, and what happened to it is a different story entirely: sales, a censored sleeve, and a government file. That is tomb of the Mutilated.
