CDVS: Smokey Robinson vs. Suffocation

What times we live in. Smokey Robinson, original eye of the quiet storm, starts tripping on God and New York death metal legend Suffocation reunites. Is it coincidence? Or is the right hand of Providence setting up the chess board for the end game? Lo, what fulsome clouds gather in the east as the CDVS battle arena cries for blood: pop-soul legend with a Bible in hand vs. death-barking homunculi, Motown slick meets the glass-gargling worms of the Big Apple. The war has begun.

Robinson certainly isn't lacking for sentiment. His contemporary gospel debut, Food for the Spirit, shines through and through with the kind of cheerful, whey-faced piety that often marks the dubious conversions of drug addicts and death row inmates. And yet Food for the Spirit has some flavor, too, such as on the sweet, loping "I Praise & Worship You Father" and "He Can Fix Anything," which spunks along so nicely on its light R&B groove that it's easy to imagine Jesus himself doing a little Egyptian funk-neck. But rolling this Food over your tongue does reveal a certain blandness that's not necessarily musical; rather, it's in the flat literalism of the songs that belie Robinson's title (bestowed by no less than Bob Dylan) as America's greatest living poet. On the bass-bouncing "Gang Bangin'," for instance, you can practically see Smokey wagging his finger like some schoolmarm as he sings, "Stayin' out late/ Preachin' that hate/ Defyin' your mother/ Killin' your brothers." A cardinal sin: The music is hobbled by the message.

It's a weakness that Suffocation is more than happy to exploit. On the band's sixth album, Souls to Deny, the death metal outfit effectively barks down the idea of reunion meaning tummy flab and timid chops. Whirling like a kitchen disposal possessed, Suffocation's Souls to Deny engages Smokey's Food for the Spirit with such brutal yet highly calculated metallimania--"To Weep Once More" crazed with venomous solos, "Surgery of Impalement" biting like some mechanical barracuda, "Immortally Condemned" muscling into your brain with hardcore chug--that before the CDVS referee even has a chance to call a knockout, all we spectators see are the earthly raiments of bone and flesh falling away as a golden wisp rises, to a faint chorus of angels, toward that cloud-pillared Motown in the sky.--Andrew Kiraly