The saga continues. My journey to unfold this special part of death metal history has now led me to another man that was an integral part of the Internal Bleeding sound. His name is Brian Hobbie and he is the original bassist of the band. It was great to learn his side of the story as he shared some memorable moments from the early days of NY death metal. If my mind serves me right, he was the youngest member of the band and was responsible for delivering the subsonic low end emissions for the massive slams that are Internal Bleeding. He tells us of his time in the band when he joined in the beginning of 1993. This guy was there for the birth of some of our favorite and most cherished bands of all time. It is with great appreciation that I now present to you Brian Hobbie's recollection of his experience in NY Death Metal.
It was a slam filled era... -Lou
It has been forever since I’ve been asked about my time in Internal Bleeding. I must say that the best years took place almost 20 years ago. I know that you are looking for evidence that are fact—the real deal. Sometimes a certain question might get me going or make me have to think. I did the best job I could for the reader and I apologize if I took long. I remember a time when I used to do a lot of interviews at once and would be on a roll. Regardless, I am very excited to describe to you all my experience in Internal Bleeding and the entire New York Death Metal community.The early days of NY Death Metal were very active and fresh. It seemed as though a lot of new Death Metal acts from the early days had an easier shot at reaching a pivotal point due to the new movement of death metal that was going on in New York. The basics made you work harder and you gained strong potential from it if you had your shit together as a band. Those days were the beginnings of Immolation, Cannibal Corpse (relocated to Tampa, Florida), Baphomet, Mortician, Demolition Hammer, Sorrow, Malignancy, Suffocation, Morpheus Descends just to name a few. Malevolent Creation and Deicide, who were based in Upstate New York, relocated to Tampa also in the early days too from what I recall. Around 1991-1992 that bands like Embrionic Death, Pyrexia, and many others came to be throughout the decade. Communication and Press activity was a big part of the times and was personal too. Fanzines, demos, and any source of mass communication through mailed letters made it work. The bands were also heavily networking throughout the world and traded live media of the shows. There are bands that still do it today but just not as many. Atleast not in the same fashion as it used to be, I've noticed. Today, NY Death Metal bands rely on the internet. In the early days, there were times when I would actually get hand written letters from fans that lived no more than 20 minutes away. These letters were to buy a demo tape, merchandise, and to correspond with the band. I do not see if that truly happens anymore but at the time it showed how active and involved the NY Death Metal community was. It was more fun with less distractions and bullshit. It was one state under brutality.
I must say that Internal Bleeding is the best band I've ever played in. I started working with them in early 1993. I was about 19 years old at the time. It was a great time to be playing NY Death Metal during the early 1990's. One of the coolest things was getting a plaque-like award for the sales of the “Perpetual Degradation” record. A record store in California called Wild Rags Records, the label that released it, had the award made for us. This achievement made the band work harder to reach high potential. I learned many of the do(s) and don’t(s) from being in Internal Bleeding also. It was the first time I started corresponding with people around world and the experiences in the whole music business. The 1996 U.S. Tour with Immolation and Six Feet Under during the “Voracious Contempt” days was incredible! We used to practice in this two level auto-mechanics warehouse. We had rented it from a friend and had five bands in there later on. It was big enough to pull off a show and brought out some out-of-state bands to jam with. Needless to say, it got insane and had a lot of cops showing up. People ran everywhere to get away. It was truly great, something out of a movie.
There was a venue called The Roxy Music Hall that was our second home because we played there all the time. We got to open up for alot of awesome acts such as Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Overkill,Broken Hope, Morbid Angel, and Forbidden. We had more out of state friends than local. Sometimes, we would drive to New Jersey or even Maryland to hang out with bands and people. Don't get me wrong, we hung out we with a lot of people at home too. Most of them either moved or got into different things. People came and went all the time. I still talk to some of the old school fellasthrough internet. I have even made some new friends that we never got to jam for but they are die-hard Internal Bleeding fans since the “Invocation of Evil” days.
I believe that slam has many different forms. What many of Death Metal, Thrash Metal, or even some Black Metal bands don't realize or don't want to admit is that everyone has some slam parts in their music in one way or another. I think that just about every band that plays brutal music wants to see people go nuts in the pit. Slams are heavy grooves and heavy rhythms to make people move. Black Sabbath was a heavy and headbanging band with slam parts in almost every song. They are a major influence to everything we listened to. Metal bands all over the world express slam metal in their own way or style. The NY style just has a very well-known presence in the metal community for being the style it is. NY Slam is an extreme force of rhythm and groove as opposed to flat-out speed and intensity all the time. For Internal Bleeding, grinds and fast stuff was just filler for the slams—this was the priority in our style. A completely different approach from what everyone else was doing. During this time every band from Long Island (and still today) was getting by default, tagged as a "Suffocation clone", which was at the time expected. So, it sort of gave us a reason to just experiment with the slam riffs and less technicality to avoid that. It worked for us.Here is a review tagging Internal Bleeding as a Suffocation clone.
Taken from http://www.metal-archives.com/
These are the roots of... something... - 42% out of 100%
Written by Noktorn on January 31st, 2008
Once upon a time, Internal Bleeding was a crappy Suffocation clone instead of a uniquely crappy death metal/hardcore hybrid, and in this style, they turned out one album called 'Voracious Contempt'. The year of this album was 1995, which was the height of both death metal sucking and second-string underground death metal labels like Pavement being willing to put out just about anything in the wake of Roadrunner offering up their roster of DM groups as a sacrifice to the Gods Ov Capitalism. This is a very important thing to remember, because I can assure you that in NO OTHER YEAR would Internal Bleeding ever be signed by a decent label. At least, that's what I like to think. I love to pretend that there aren't labels who will release such mind-numbingly mediocre music onto the metal public. With this capacity for self-deception you'd think I would have liked the latest Obituary album!
Musically, 'Voracious Contempt' sounds almost exactly like Suffocation's 'Pierced From Within' (which was conveniently released five months prior to this album). Granted, it lacks the very convoluted riffing and song structures and abstract themes of that band, but every track on this album is pretty much a straight-up clone of 'Thrones Of Blood'. Remember that song's breakdown? Remember how it became the prototypical breakdown for just about every NYDM song that came out for, oh, a decade after it? Well, Internal Bleeding was clearly riding that wave hard, because every track has that same, sludgy "CHUN... CHUN... CHUN..." break. There are some blasting sections with mostly inaudible tremolo riffing, lots of midpaced, hardcore-inspired grooves, and lots of guttural, somewhat burping growls. There's also a constant procession of start/stop chug riffs over double bass that all sound pretty much exactly like each other.
One of the big things that prevents this from being a mediocre yet enjoyable piece of brutal death metal is the production. It's got that mid to low level studio production of a lot of mid-'90s DM groups, with decent sounding drumming, somewhat submerged vocals, and way overly distorted guitars recorded at too high a volume to preserve any modicum of tone. Same thing happened to Suffocation on, surprise surprise, 'Pierced From Within'; the distortion gets to the point where you can't actually, you know, hear the difference between notes, preventing coherent riffs from being composed. This alone pretty much damns the album from ever being in regular rotation from me. Mortician can get away with it. Internal Bleeding can't.
The only other real detail to speak of when it comes to this album is of influence. While listening to 'Voracious Contempt', you can actually pick out a lot of riffs that seem very ahead of their time; many of the groove riffs sound like modern slams that a band like Devourment would use, and many people do suggest that Internal Bleeding is one of the bands that really coined the concept of slam death, if not the name or a real grasp of what the style was. At the same time, though, I don't know how much of this is slam death and how much of it is just overblown Suffocation worship that sort of blindly stumbled into the 'slam' sound by accident. Internal Bleeding sounds like slam death in a lot of ways, but slam death doesn't really sound like Internal Bleeding; I'd argue that the biggest thing here is the fusion of hardcore and death metal (though more limited than on later albums).
Internal Bleeding got somewhat better from here, but this really wasn't a promising start. If you're trying to start a museum for random Suffoclones, you might as well pick it up, but I don't see a real reason why. You'll never remember any of the songs, riffs, or lyrics, and it's not even that pleasant when it's going on. It's easy to ignore, and doing so isn't really a bad idea.
The NY Style of Death Metal is credited to Suffocation for being one of the originators of the N.Y./Long Island style. With their influence, it got taken to the next level trying to be as original as possible. Just like when Motorhead and Venom influneced just about every Thrash band in California in the early 80's and beyond. When Internal Bleeding first started, the local Death Metal scene at first wasn't the first influences we had. Whoever we were trading demos with at the time were. Underground bands like Mortal Decay, Dying Fetus, Tyrant Trooper, Exmortis, anything underground were influences. You just couldn't ignore it because it was a form of slam too. East Coast Death Metal got as far as the other coasts too. No matter what, it was all extreme and brutal metal. Even if not all of them had a lot of slam riffs, the tradition was upheld in their music still. Vital Remains from Rhode Island has their own style of slam parts, I've always thought. The East Coast scene has come a long way and has offered plenty. All of the coasts of the U.S. have had their own legacies and histories of playing Death Metal.
On an ending note, one of my best times was when we got to play a festival in the same building as Slayer in 1994 and again after their five year hiatus. These were great times to play Slam metal. Somewhere out there, there is four or five seventeen year old kids in a practice room playing slam metal in some form and they just may be the next best thing if they do it right and keep it real. We'll see what the future brings and can hopefully fill the void we have in Death Metal today.Thank you all. It has been some of the best times of my life.
Internal Bleeding is forever.
