Suffocation and the Roots of Brutal Death

For good reasons Slam-Minded tends to focus on newer bands and newer releases. If we just talked about old material, the blog would get stale fast. However, I think occasionally it is worth revisiting the classics and the founders of a genre. Not only does this remind you of what makes the music great, it also means you are only listening to premium music. This is what I've been doing recently (as you can see, no reviews for a couple weeks), but I wanted to share my thoughts about probably the most important band for Brutal Death: Suffocation.

Suffocation pretty much single-handedly took death metal from heavier thrash metal and melodic stuff like Morbid Angel and the Swedish scene, and created the path of percussive, rhythmic, brutal death metal that we know and love today. No disrespect to those other bands, but I personally feel that the path Suffocation created is the best, and closest to what I feel is great about death metal. Listen to songs like "Infecting the Crypts" and "Liege of Inveracity" and you can see the seeds of slam death that would sprout a little less than a decade later. If you enjoy all the new bands that we write about here, then you owe Suffocation a debt of gratitude. I'm sure almost every reader of this blog has heard Suffocation, but I encourage you to go back and remember how amazing these guys were and are.