Suffocation - Breeding the Spawn

Wow. What a fucking downer this album was when it came out. Holy shit.

First off, this album is still a "brutal death metal" album. Suffo didn't start tap dancing and wearing top hats and shit, all of a sudden, when this came out. No, that wasn't the problem here. Someone should have bopped on over to the offices at Roadrunner and went postal on each and every hapless soul who had the misfortune of being there that day for allowing whoever it was that runs things over there to put this album out in the condition that it was released in. I don't mean in terms of the packaging, because in that department 'Breeding the Spawn' sports one of the bands most killer album covers to date not to mention the sick ass, ice blue color scheme. No. Whoever was in control of that aspect is fully deserving of their get out of jail free card. Nah, I'm talking about the fucking idiots who prevented the band from re-teaming with Scott Burns and the boys down at Morrisound, because whoever recorded this abominable catastrophe of an album was obviously on a 6 month long bender that included wallowing in moonshine culled only from the finest vats of toxic waste over in the bowels of New Jersey.

Each and every musician on this record sounds as if they were beaten with a tube sock filled with padlocks and stupidity as each instrument senselessly goes about morphing from one manifestation of astonishing idiocy to the next. Everyone is Thorazine shuffling around and sloppily bumping into one another like a herd of village idiots mercilessly packed into a 6 by 8 ft sized jail cell. I've heard from more than a few "admirers" of this album that despite the shitty production, it is actually a work of genius. Well, what-the-fuck-ever to that. I know suck when I hear suck and this fucking sucks.

Perhaps the most laughable aspect of this album are Frank Mullen's vocal patterns, or lack thereof. I mean it really sounds as if the other guys in the band sprung a surprise on him and were like "hey dude, by the way, we just recorded an album this morning and we need you to write lyrics for it and record them in the next half hour". I'm not saying that you have to sound pattern predictable like Glen Benton, which let's face it, can be agonizingly lame in its own right, but god damn dude. This shit sounds as if Frank caught a case of the 'fuck its' and hired some booze hound off the streets to come in and have at it on the mic.

This is also the album where Suffocation began to go off on mindless tangents that go absolutely no-fucking-where rather than make the attempt to write an actual song. Granted, for its time, 'Effigy...' wasn't exactly James Taylor inspired but from 'Breeding..' on, the amount of memorable songs became far and few between.

I always assumed that Mike Smith took and beat feet after this album because he could no longer cut it, because the drumming on this album is just downright fucking horrid in comparison to the band's debut. I guess the only redeeming aspect of 'Breeding...' are the leads, which most of my guitar nerd friends speak fairly highly of, but again, being more of riff hound, I could care less about that sort of thing so at the end of the day this album was a major, major fucking letdown.