.Total.Fucking.Slam. II

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.

.Total.Fucking.Slam.

Sup Fellas!

It is with the greatest pride and pleasure that I now create this blog. My name is Lou and I am a native of New York. How should I begin? There was a time... I have dedicated a better part of my life to a form of ear obliterating music known as Brutal Death Metal and after all of my experiences with this horrendous music, I felt that the time has come for me to create a place to preserve an important part of the history of this incredible music. Brutal Death Metal has taken many forms over the decades and one of its originating seedlings known as Slam has captivated me so deeply that it literally changed my life. I can safely say that the creature responsible for the birth of slam is New York's very own Internal Bleeding. These NY natives of a land filled with thugs, light-speed lifestyles, and much "kawfee" consumption have laid out the foundation that remains a major factor in the evolution of modern brutal death metal. They took it upon themselves to create a style of death metal that centralized around the element that would normally be used in a climatic moment of your favorite death metal tune aka Suffocation's Liege of Inveracity. You know what I am talking about. That beastly moment, that part of the song that is so hyped up it literally implodes, that chuggy chug moment that feels like a sawed-off buckshot to the face, or better yet that slammable onslaught moment that sends the savages in the pit into an endless frenzy of annihilation. Yeah, now you know. Internal Bleeding is responsible for taking that element of a death metal tune and making it universal; where every song is a stream of perpetual groove drenched pit riffs. The purpose of this blog is to provide to you, the reader, a place to learn all about this monster known as slam. Its history and the fine gentlemen responsible for creating timeless tunes that to this day remain unmatched. They shadow just about every new modern death metal band while continuing to leave you wanting more. These forefathers have develop something special, something immortal, that all of us avid death metal listeners can still look back on and say to ourselves, "Oh shit! no way!" I will focus on the birth of it all in the East Coast of North America and its critical peripheral influences all around the world. I will bring to light the relationships between these gentlemen and their correspondence that transcended state-lines, coast-lines, and international oceans. I will not forget about that foul monster from Texas known as Devourment, a most digusting beast that it is and the immortality that is Molesting the Decapitated. I hope that you will enjoy this as much as I will enjoy digging up the remnants of slam death metal history straight from the thoughts and memories of these savages responsible. What better way to initiate this blog of slam death metal history than to start by presenting to you an anecdotal recollection straight from the core of slam itself. The man himself, Chris Pervelis. It is an honor to have dissected his memories and the end result will serve as the foundation for the modus operandi of this blog.

Stay tuned for more intensive updates an revisions! Enjoy!



TOTAL FUCKING SLAM
By Chris Pervelis







I must confess that my memory may be a little hazy; time can do that to you. If I have omitted or incorrectly identified certain people, places, bands and time frames, I am truly sorry.


When Internal Bleeding first started in 1991, there were handful of bands out on Long Island and in the New York area and naturally they were a big influence on us. Particularly Bill and Anthony; they were more tuned in to what was going on in NY than I was. I had been more into slow, heavy and groove oriented sounds from bands like Black Sabbath, Obituary and others. Tom (original bassist) and Brian (original vocalist) were more into European and Floridian stuff. At first we struck a pretty good balance with these influences and our first two songs "Invocation of Evil" and "Genocide" reflect that mix.





One night, Bill, Anthony and I were at a diner after practice. We had a long discussion about the direction of the band. I can remember this day like it was yesterday. Anthony and Bill weren't happy with the sound, and I wasn't either. We started talking about what we should sound like and we all pretty much came to the conclusion that we wanted to be a band that concentrated on writing heavy riffs with groove to them and throw a few blast beats in to separate the grooves.





We thought most bands concentrated more on the blasting and grinding, so we decided to go the other way. That's basically how our sound was born. Is it completely original? No. But I think it is an approach that some bands hinted at but no one took to the level we did.





We always hated the word "mosh" so Bill had suggested we use "slam riff" instead of "mosh riff" and so "TOTAL FUCKING SLAM" was born. It became our standing philosophy to write music that would always be centered around slam riffs and we held ourselves to a very high standard. We slaved over every riff we wrote, dumped songs that didn't make the cut and we really worked hard on arranging things for maximum tension and release. On top of that, we marketed ourselves pretty well, defining ourselves as "Total Fucking Slam." That gave use something that other bands didn't have...a marketing slogan (it's the ad man in me. I own an ad business).





Funny story, when Anthony wrote the big breakdown in "Anointed in Servitude," we almost dumped it because it was a little too happy sounding (we used to say riffs like that sounded "bouncy"). I am glad we changed our mind, but it took a lot of internal arguing with each other to keep it in the song. It wasn't originally in the place it is now and with some creative arranging, we got it into a spot that made the riff really powerful and dynamic.





In all fairness, I think Dying Fetus was taking this approach as well and I think that's why we sparked up a great friendship with those guys. We shared such similar values musically. I can remember getting the "Bathe in Entrails" demo in the mail, popping it in, listening to it and saying "Fuck! These guys get it!" I took the tape right to the studio to let the band hear it and we all freaked. I can remember Anthony totally loosing himself and throwing a garbage can against a wall and kicking the couch in our studio when he heard it. Pretty soon after that we went down to Maryland to play with them and Ripping Corpse.





The ONE DOLLAR DEMO was just a rehearsal tape that we put together because one of our buddies liberated a bunch of blank tapes from a law school. I had a four-track, so I figured lets record something so we can sell at our first show. It came out horrible, but we sold it for a dollar, so the price was fair. I listen to it now and laugh. I can hear our sound developing, but it wasn't quite "there" yet.





I think the sound we were looking for came to fruition on INVOCATION OF EVIL. The production was good, the playing was good, albeit a tad sloppy in places, and the songs I think were excellent. When it came out, people went totally nuts for it. I couldn't believe it. We packed our asses in a van and went anywhere and everywhere to play and sell demos. We met so many great down-to-earth people and bands and their hospitality was amazing. Eventually we put the demo out with Wild Rags and it took off even more. A lot of people didn't like Richard at Wild Rags, but I loved the guy. All business all the time. He taught me a lot and I owe him a lot for his guidance and the boost he gave the band.





The pinnacle of our demo days were reached with PERPETUAL DEGRADATION. We went back to the same recording studio (Legend in Islip NY) and worked hard on making it sound heavier and less thin than Invocation of Evil. I think we achieved that. It was a bit of a panicked time for us because we dumped Wallace, who was a great frontman, but he just wasn't serious enough. Instead of waiting till we got a new vocalist, and cutting off our momentum, Bill stepped up and delivered a great vocal performance. Perfect for that demo.





We found Frank shortly after that and we all just knew we had something really special. We hit the road, played hard and busted our ass. Frank was just unreal as a frontman. He took the band to such an incredible level. Now, not only were we putting out what we thought was good stuff, but we were all working our asses off to give listeners a hell of a stage show too. It all just clicked. Pretty soon Pavement signed us.





We went into the recording of VORACIOUS CONTEMPT confident and ready to put out a great album. We had new songs, plus the demo songs and things felt so right. Unfortunately, poor production obscured the quality of that album. I think we were overwhelmed with being in a big 24 track studio and we lost sight of the production aspect. Scott Burns did what he could to it, but I just think it would have been a great success if it had better production. Our tour for that album with Immolation and Six Feet Under was great though. We couldn't believe how many people knew the material. Some shows were just nuts, with our pits generating blood and broken limbs!





Although it never got the exposure that it deserved, I think THE EXTINCTION OF BENEVOLENCE was our best release as far as all-out heaviness is concerned. It suffered in the production department, but the songs and Frank's vocals were just insanely heavy. I wish more people got to see us perform these songs on tour and that the album got greater exposure.





From a production and songwriting standpoint, DRIVEN TO CONQUER took IB to new heights. The addition of Guy Marchais on guitar really pushed me and the rest of the guys to play harder and better. Guy is the consummate musician. He was a total pro when he joined us and I think we were still really good amateurs. I think the lyrics on that album are my personal best, and I think Bill's drumming on that is his best as well. This release also had a lot of Brian Hobbie's touch on it, which is great. He is a great bass player, and he got to show it on this album and in some of the riffs he put together.





I think we've made a place for ourselves in deathmetal history. I am really proud of that. We weren't the best technically, but we made the most out of our concept of how deathmetal should be and pushed ourselves to the limit on every song. I am glad people recognize our music and our hard work. It's a source of endless pride for me, and I'm sure, my bandmates.







The best part? The fans and friends. I still talk to many today, and all IB fans and bands we've played with are encouraged to contact me. I'd love to hear from you. At one point in the mid-1990s, I think Long Island and NY was the place to be. We had such incredible bands floating around. Suffocation, Afterbirth, Necrosis, Pyrexia, Dehumanized, Baphomet, Immolation and so many others. Places like the Wetlands, Castle Heights and the Roxy were constantly packed for underground bands. National acts did even better, and one of the best shows I ever attended was the Hangman's Ball at the Ritz. The place was packed and all the bands just ruled. Suffo, Grave, Ripping Corpse, etc. Man what a show!


There was always an element of competition amongst underground bands (though many didn't talk about it), but I think that made each band better. Call it friendly competition if you will, but the level that underground bands got to was unreal. Tight, precision playing, excellent vocals and stage presence were the norm, not the exception.








Basically, I think its the level of brutality that sets NYDM apart. It was never all about blasting. NY bands all had riffs you could remember. And in a scene where blinding speed is highly prized, the memorable riffs are a breath of fresh air. I cannot help but think the aura and reputation of NY has something to do with it too. NY is filled with thugs, tough-guys, etc. and I think that helps all the NYDM band's reputations.



I still listen to a lot of deathmetal and the music has progressed greatly. However, call me a child of the 90s, but I still am constantly listening to great releases from that era: "Effigy" from Suffocation, "Sickening Erotic Fanaticism" from Mortal Decay (NJ band, but godly), "Sermon of Mockery" from Pyrexia, "The Dead Shall Inherit" from Baphomet, and so many more. Bands such as Dehumanized, Afterbirth, Malignancy, Damonacy (NJ I know, but they ruled), Mortician, Repudilation, Embryonic Death, Immortal Suffering, Necrosis and so on...I cannot keep up with all the greats from that era!








I wish I could find the time to put a band back together and play some old-school style IB, but with kids and a business to run, my time is so limited. I have about 100 riffs to go, but it's hard to get things together. I know Bill is into doing it, just need to find some others. It'll happen, just will take some time.