TIME2MOSH: Suffocation

This is the next installation of my critically acclaimed series of columns spotlighting the most punishing mosh riffs in existence, entitled TIME2MOSH. You may not always agree with my definition of a mosh riff, but you will probably ALWAYS agree that the riffs I pick are pretty gosh darn mighty.

Last time I spotlighted just a couple of the many thrash metal mosh riffs by the band Slayer. That was a good place to start, since they pretty much started the whole moshing deal-i-o, but honestly, they kind of suck at it.

In my eyes, there are two metal genres that really bring forth the mosh, and they are reviled by pretty much everyone on the internet, other than some guy:

Slamming Brutal Death Metal

and

Deathcore

These genres have BREAKDOWNS(!!!), which are half time chugging riffs in the middle of a song inteded for the sole purpose of CRUSHING PITT RIFFMENT(!!!). They go about breakdowns slightly differently, but the idea is generally the same:

1. Wear Baseball Caps

2. CRUSHING PITT RIFFMENT!!!

You can usually tell the genres apart because SLAM logos have a corny photoshop 3D effect on them, and are always in a single bad looking color, while -CORE logos look like they had a professional graphic designer and a record label, but not one that REALLY knew what they were doing, so like one of the letters will look bad or asymetrical or something.

The band that started both of these genres had nothing to do with baseball caps, or corny photoshop effects, but still had the pitt riffment that makes them great.

I am, of course, talking about the almighty Suffocation!

That's right. No caps.

I have recently started going by the mantra 'you can only make your first album once', because I see so many horrible freshman releases by new bands and stuff, and I think Suffocation really had this in mind when they made theirs. Effigy of the Forgotten. (I don't count the album before it, Human Waste, because it's gosh darn terrible!) Effigy of the Forgotten is full of some of the sickest, most crushing, crushing pitt riffment ever. Take for example this song:

I'm not even going to tell you where to mosh, cause if you can't hear it, you should probably just kill yourself or something.

After that they had like two albums where they tried to be complicated or proggy or something, and I don't like them, even though everyone else does.

That's cool though because a couple of years ago they released a monster called Blood Oath, and it goes back to the Crushing Riffment no problemo!!!

CRUSHING PITT RIFFMENT AT 2:29, ANYONE???

So that's basically Suffocation. If you know anything about music, you can see how they pretty much influenced every band int he past 20 years with their massive riffment. They're pretty much just like The Rolling Stones, if The Rolling Stones had guitars tuned to B-flat, half-time chugging grooves, sick guttural vocals, arbitrary blastbeats, and atonal riffage.

Next Time: Next time will probably happen a few more times from now than this time happened from last time, but that was just because I was just so excited about the pittage! Next time I'll probably talk about either Devourment or Internal Bleeding, depending on my mood. Colorful band names await! Off to the skies, Superman!!!