Suffocation @ BB King - 7/13/08

I don't know how or even why I decided to go see the show tonight. The night before I was partying with my cousins, Albert and Michael, Albert's girlfriend (I forget her name) and her sister Audrey. I got shit-faced drunk after downing a Jack-and-Coke, a few Long Island Ice Teas, and some green shit called Incredible Hulks - fuck, it could have been absinthe for all I know. Long story short, I passed out and don't remember a goddamn thing that happened from the bar to Albert's house. Oh, yeah, and I threw up on the subway train in front of passengers. (I'm really cool now... NOT!)

So, when I awoke from my hangover after an awful incident I'd rather not get into and would like to forget, I made the spontaneous decision to go see Suffocation at my club, BB King. For $27, I expected a better show. There were only three bands playing that night, one of which, Nethereal, kept having technical troubles, and ultimately had to switch out their amp - and that's when things got worse for them. The amp was so loud and distorted that it drowned out the vocals and made the entire set seem uneven. It felt like all the players were doing their own thing, totally out of sync with one another, and eventually lost all cohesiveness. Oh, and their drummer had this constant stupid smug look on his face, which irritated the piss out of me.

The second band, Eyes of the Dead, were slightly better, at least their sound gelled with everything else, but they were pretty much like all the other bands who play metal nowadays - nothing unique and nothing that would suggest a future in metal. Hell, their name sounds like another band's name, like Through the Eyes of the Dead, who obviously took that name from the first song on Cannibal Corpse's "The Bleeding" minus the "Staring". I did mention to the singer that if Rob Douche quit Exodus that he should definitely replace him. The resemblance, unfortunately, is uncanny.

I didn't know much about Suffocation other than it had a couple black dudes in the band - always a strange concept to me, but I accept it. Well, much like the "in-between shows" that come before the biggie shows (like Cavalera Conspiracy this weekend - YEAH, BOY!) Suffocation was a pretty decent stop-gap band that really delivered a healthy/lethal dose of technical death metal. They were a breath of fresh air to the unevenness and mellow metal that had played earlier in the evening. I don't know any of their songs, but the crowd seemed to dig it. One thing I didn't understand was that the frontman, Frank Mullen, kept doing this odd hand gesture, like he was waving at someone who was on the verge of having a stroke. The bassist, Derek Boyer, squatted so low playing his instrument that it looked like he was trying to drop a douce.

In the end, the evening was salvaged by Suffocation, but not worth $27. I think had they rejoined with Immolation in a joint headlining tour like last year, then maybe, but the evening wasn't even worth $20. I was happy to know that they were nice guys, and got the usual picture with each member before calling it a day. When drummer Mike Smith tossed out a stick, I nearly caught it but the old geezer next to me had some help from Slow Dan and Giant Chris and he got it. I had to settle for the stick I got from the kid from Eyes of the Dead. That's like settling for number 2 instead of number 1. The old man should be in a retirement home, not at a metal concert.

THE END