DEATH’S “SUICIDE MACHINE” STREAMS FREE, ROCKS BALLZ
A song can be like the Kennedy assassination: Your first knowledge of it is an event, so you can’t help but forever remember the moment when it came barging into your once-perfectly sane life. The song changes you a little and takes on an aura (or whatever) that stirs you physically for years. It’s a personal thing, but as a confident professional, I’ll limb out and share one: Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is.” That song was the end of innocence for me; music was no longer purely magical, a series of neat sounds emitting from a crappy clock radio. To my young ears, music had grown horns, all malevolent, capable of harm and cynicism, darkly powerful, and unwilling to compromise. As such, I can instantly recall the view as I stared down at the now-menacing clock radio as I would a dog that had mauled my face unantagonized. This song, I thought, makes life fucking horrible. I eagerly await the day that radio programmers extract the dagger from my nards by cutting it from rotation. Permanently.
Sigh. It was a lonely feeling facing off with the awful choir reprises and pug-faced pseudo-silk of middle-aged Foreigner. But I would rebound years later, when local college radio unleashed upon me Death’s “Suicide Machine,” from their Human album.
It was all that Foreigner stuff in reverse. Well, wait, not exactly; “Suicide Machine” also is unholy, starkly violent, and hair-raising — only in a good way. A very good way. Like the Foreigner incident, my first time with “Suicide Machine” prompts visual memory, and this time it’s staring across my parents’ living room at the stereo from which the song emitted. It was like a Alfred Hitchcock dolly-out/zoom-in shot in Vertigo. You couldn’t have broken my rapt gaze with a naked Samantha Fox poster. I was into it, dude.
You, MetalSucks reader of awesomeness, could be likewise rocked today cuz the fancy re-mixed, remastered “Suicide Machine” streams free at Death’s Facebook page. I didn’t know it then, but this kind of rad is what results from pioneer Chuck Schuldiner when backed by the assassin-level skill of Cynic (guitarist/composer Paul Masvidal, drummer Sean Reinert) and bassist Steve DiGiorgio of awesome Sadus and Testament’s The Gathering. Its rerelease is timely cuz duh it’s better than everything, but extra fun as a send-off to its recently deceased subject, Jack Kevorkian. Crank it up!
-ADF
Death’s seminal Human album has been remixed by producer Jim Morris, remastered, and crammed with fun extras. Get it here, now from Relapse Records.
