A mere year and a half after their last Paris show, Suffocation is back in town to promote Hymns For The Apocrypha, their first album with vocalist Ricky Myers, who's been with the band on and off for nearly ten years now. Mainstay guitarist Terrance Hobbs has been the guardian of the temple for over three decades but membership matters very little. What matters is that when you play the new album, and when you attend a Suffo show, you get a quintessentially Suffo experience: brutal, technical Death Metal with sick blast beats, gnarly breakdowns and the most demonic, throat-rupturing growls this side of the Kraken.
Petit Bain is a cool little club in a boat permanently docked on the river Seine, and on the occasion it was absolutely packed to the gills with rabid metalheads wanting nothing but to celebrate all things Death Metal. When Suffocation played excerpts from their classics Effigy Of The Forgotten and Breeding The Spawn, the crowd erupted into a frantic pit of fury: hair, beer, sweat and maybe even other bodily fluids were thrown around as bodies thrashed, clashed and crashed to what is essentially the soundtrack of a mass disembowelment.
After a little over an hour of quartering an audience that had already moshed their hearts out through three previous Death Metal bands, Suffocation left the stage in an avalanche of feedback, their demented anthems of brutality still echoing in the concussed heads of the fans in attendance. A little later, some of the band members hung out by the tour bus in front of the venue and the contrast between their genial personalities and the absolute onslaught of violence they unleashed on the stage couldn't be any starker. Shortly after, they were off to the next gig in the south of France, before moving on to Spain, and the rest of Europe. Because oddly enough, for the musicians and fans of the genre alike, Death Metal is a way of... life.
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