Suffocation
Pierced From Within

In the summer between middle school and high school, I walked into a record store in a Varazze alley.
I had seen a poster for the movie "The Crow" on display. It was two meters tall and one and a half meters wide. I wanted to know if they sold it.
Yes, they did. Alright, it's mine.
Curiously I looked at the cassette shelves and, being a hard and convinced rocker, knowledgeable of all Pelù's lyrics and Ghigo's solos, from the height of my 14 years it seemed like it was time to find out who the hell these blessed Iron Maiden were.
So at the counter, I added "a real live one" to the Brandon Lee enlargement. The shopkeeper told me, "but if you like Iron Maiden, you should really like this too," and from under the counter, he pulled out a copy of King for A Day. "And how the hell do I know if I like Iron Maiden, I like the T-shirts..." But I didn't feel like being a snot-nose and I feigned interest as an experienced musical explorer. I also snagged those Faith No More.
My first two metal albums. It could have gone much worse. Even if I NEVER appreciated King For A Day.

With the first two years of high school, thanks to a classmate, I deepened my exploration of the Maiden's discography and, on the side, developed an embarrassing love for the national Liga, who at the time was peeking without too much shyness at the balcony of great success with his Elvis-like nights. I supplemented this with everything MTV showed that was "violent" (which translated to "Prodigy," "Prodigy," and "Prodigy").
Then it happened that I got sick of studying and preferred to discover the joys of failure.

I was 16 years old, my musical tastes were quite confused, my self-esteem was quite shaky, and I lived a quite present onanism. I repeat: I was quite 16 years old.
That summer of adolescent crisis, I informed my parents that whether they liked it or not, I was growing up, that I was tired of killing myself with jerk-offs, that I wanted to grow up too and that even if I had failed, I would have at least "earned" a week of vacation alone with a friend. So, just to try growing up.
Against all possible expectations, my parents agreed. I guess the reason was that they no longer knew what to do to shake my personality from the catatonic state in which it had been floating for too long. (Yes, it's the story of a loser. In metal, it always starts like this: losers and outcasts. The metalheads who deny it are the ones who are still stuck at this first step).
I reached this milestone around August 10th, and there wasn't much time left to get organized. And, above all, all my few friends already had other things to do until September.
I thought of Davide.
I've known Davide since I was born. We lived in the same building, were born the same year, and our mothers found it natural to let us play together in the garden. Then Davide and I naturally started seeing each other at each other's homes. Then we went to elementary school together.
We split in middle school, and I remember we met once a year. In ninth grade, we never saw each other. In tenth grade, we met only once.
On that occasion, I had to retrieve some documents for my mother, documents that were with his mother. I imagine they were housing-related documents since over the years my family had moved, and Davide and I no longer lived in the same building for many years.
When we saw each other, we greeted each other a bit awkwardly: what the hell do you say to someone who was like a brother (neither of us remembers how we met) for a lifetime and whom you now barely recognize? He had long hair and looked much more mature and integrated into life than I was, according to my eyes. I have no idea what impression my image gave him. The only thing I remember from that meeting is that he told me he had just found out he was going to fail. Which comforted me: I wasn't alone!
Anyway, while my parents were accommodating my requests for emancipation, in the midst of panic about how to obtain it given the limited availability of friends at that moment, I remembered that meeting a few months before. And I called him.

"Hey, hi, how are you? So did they fail you in the end? Oh, for me they did, but anyway, I wanted to know, would you like to come to the mountains with me in a week?"

Overall, although we didn't know what to say to each other when we met a few months before, it took us no time to agree that a week without parents would have been a good thing.
In the following days, our mothers talked I guess 20 times a day, and him and I a couple.
In one of these calls he asked me:

"Listen, but if I bring some records is that a problem, I mean do you like listening to music?"

"Hell yes!" (You see, I tell myself, time and distance have kept us close anyway).

"Okay, but I listen to heavy metal maybe you don't like it."

"!!! No I love it, I am a metalhead too: my favorite band is Iron Maiden and I got the Prodigy CD as a gift!"

At the word "Prodigy" I heard his face palm through the phone.

"Alright then, I'll bring something."

He arrived in Macugnaga (where my parents had a house) armed with a suitcase, flowing hair, two earrings, and a smile that slightly betrayed the embarrassment of the "okay, but what the hell do we have to say to each other these days, me and this guy?"
My parents got in the car, gave us the keys, got lost in a billion recommendations that we promptly trashed in the cerebral corner of "I don't remember you said that, yet I was paying attention" and our vacation began.

Side note: Six days later, the Macugnaga carabinieri patrolled for the first time since who knows when, maybe forever, the town. They were looking for "the long-haired guy and the shaved one": they had thrown stones onto the soccer field (the problems of the law in villages of 600 inhabitants... Damn, a blind man would have found us, not the carabinieri... God: THOSE carabinieri, no. And today I have the doubt that maybe they didn't put much conviction into looking for us, considering the crime, considering the suspects, I can understand them).

We are getting lost, and I think we will never get to Suffocation at this pace, I return to the main track.

In one week Davide introduced me to Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, Megadeth, but, most of all, damn, to ManowaR!!! (I listened to Ligabue, between Manowar and Pantera who should I have chosen for intellectual coherence according to you, sorry? Lame, right?)

Manowar were a bolt from the blue, EPIC. Damn what a rush of adrenaline those choirs gave me, they seemed to come out of a dungeons and dragon box. Holy crap: echoes of armor and broadswords echoed in my ears while I looked out the window at the conifers climbing between one cloud and another on that rock palace that is the Rosa. Have mercy and try to understand. At that moment, Manowar was THE music.

We came back home and lived in symbiosis until life, my shitty character, and a person who wouldn't even deserve to be remembered decided to get in the way aggressively.
One of the first things he did once back to everyday life was to take me to Mariposa Duomo, a historic rock & metal store in Milan. It closed just a few days ago, I imagine due to the pandemic we are experiencing (Too bad, it's been twenty years since I last went, but: too bad).

I walk in and, WOW!
An eternity of records with covers clearly stating that inside are the greatest adventures your imagination will ever conceive.
I spend an hour before deciding and snagging Legendary Tales by Rapsodhy (I don't know if I put the 'h' in the right place). Davide promoted them to me as an Italian band that is having great success in industry magazines, for me, the knight on the cliff is enough and especially: THE DRAGON!

The first metal CD I ever bought: Rhapsody's debut. It can only get better, anyone who brags about having only ever listened to good stuff doesn't know what they've missed and there's a good chance they're a terribly boring person.

We go out and do things in the Duomo area, the first of a series of afternoons that would accompany us every week until we discovered drugs and alcohol three years later.
Upon returning from the outing (I don't think we went to the cinema, but it could be) we dropped by the store again and I decided to spend all the money I had saved by buying a second CD. Here no dragon but a semi-nude chick in the middle of the woods (jerks, always remember the jerks when talking about metal): Edge of Thorns by Savatage, I told you it could only get better.

At home, I listen and call Davide immediately: "Ohhh, what cool stuff there, what cool stuff here".
We spent years buying records and reviewing each other over the phone on weekends. But these first two purchases were not the origin of it all.
The origin of everything was the third metal album I ever bought.
Davide couldn't go out the week after the events reported above (flu? I wonder, surely he didn't have to study) so I went out on my own and headed towards that mecca of epicness he had recently introduced me to.
I got lost for a couple of hours among the covers, and in the end, I decided that the knights and epicness were already present in my home discography for the moment, I remembered the violent records and covers by Pantera that summer I had seen and heard carelessly at the expense of Manowar, looking for a real cohesion between image and music. And looking at the cover and the font in which Suffocation was written, in front of "Pierced From Within," I asked myself what any sane person would have wondered having the cultural baggage I had at that moment: but what the hell kind of music could be in here?

I bought it. I came home. I put it on. and by the third song, I called Davide to tell him about my purchase.

"Oh, I've never heard of them, are they good? They should be brutal death, I only have Obituary in that genre, I didn't think you'd like it."

"No, really, they're not bad"

BOOM!
Christ almighty, I know that on the other side of the line he realized instantly that I didn't like it. I can't tell him lies like he can't tell me. We both know it, but we tell them anyway knowing that on the other side no one will express dissent.

And that's it. I listened to three songs from this album, I didn't like it, I told people I liked it, and then I went to resell it. I gave it to the guy at the second-hand shop who, with the addition of five thousand lire, exchanged it for Forgotten Tales by Blind Guardian.

It is the most important album of my musical training. Not "Forgotten Tales," the one by Suffocation.
It's the album with which I discovered that I was interested in the stuff I didn't know, that "who knows what's inside?" interests me more than "the new album of your favorite band is out." The research, poking around names and covers, new music, new sounds, all things that came to me from that experience. I had found a "horrible" album (it's far from horrible, but that's how it sounded to me, if you want to know what it really sounds like go elsewhere to people more knowledgeable about musical brutalism) that had made me discover a new sound, a new way of singing, an entire reality never even imagined. Ugly, okay, but real. And giving it away led me to discover Blind Guardian, who stole my heart for the next two years. Buy, try, listen, sell, repurchase, suggest, get suggested, trash, re-listen...

If I hadn't been a metalhead, the only good things I would have listened to in my life would all be due to suggestions I had from others. And there's a precise moment when metal made me discover how beautiful all music was: when I hated it. that moment is this album, which right now, doesn't even sound that bad listening to it again.

SIDE note two: there is a review of this album on this site, but if you've read this far, that wasn't what you needed today.
​anyway you can find it here: https://www.debaser.it/suffocation/pierced-from-within/recensione

SIDE note three:
Today Davide lives with his partner and his little girls. I haven't even seen the second one, she was born when the covid fear was bursting, and I'm a smoker, in winter I have a chronic cough, and it didn't seem the right thing to enter a pediatric hospital coughing at that historical moment.
I still haven't seen her, she wasn't yet born, but I already knew the funniest consequences of her coming. When Davide gave me the news and I ironized about the fact that soon he would only be surrounded by women, chatter, and fluctuating female moods, he replied regretfully: "Jacopo, I'm telling you, and please don't tell anyone: I started peeing sitting down..."

SIDE notes four:
1)Davide is not really named Davide, no secrets have been betrayed.
2)The stones on the public and municipal soccer field of Macugnaga were thrown after the caretaker prevented us from entering for five days (PUBLIC AND MUNICIPAL!!!) accusing us of throwing stones inside. Then when it actually happened, the carabinieri got mobilized... And anyway it was 1997, it's all prescribed, sons of bitches!
3)A year after the events recounted on this page, Davide became the singer of Rez's band. And so he also introduced me to Rez. Which you probably don't care about, but it means a lot to me.
4)I don't know if you also have friends you can't remember the first meeting with, I hope so. If you don't have them, give them to your children.
5)Of Manowar, Rapsodhy, and Ligabue I don't care about today, stop laughing or I'll bash your horns in.