Grindcore, as a subgenre of
Metal, is a strange beast. It can be minimalist to the absurd, or mind-blowingly complex.
More often, it's just fast (noisy) music for the sake of speed.
Bearing this in mind, is there such a thing as a perfect grindcore band or album? I'm not certain, but
Terrorizer's "
World Downfall" might be the most perfect. The mix is just raw enough without sounding like mud or tin, the band just clicks and cranks out memorable songs without a filler to be found.
If memory serves me, this started as a side project of guitarist Jesse Pintado (RIP) and Nausea vocalist Oscar Garcia. After bringing in
Morbid Angel bassist David Vincent and drummer Pete "
Commando" Sandoval, they wrote most of these legendary songs and played a few gigs before calling it a day. Shortly after, they went into the studio to record this album, adding a few reworked Nausea songs to lengthen the play time, and metalheads rejoiced. How Jesse made the guitars sound so immense, the beast-like drumming of Pete, David's thrumming bassline anchoring each riff, and Oscar's hoarse growls created a
Masterpiece.
Lyrically, the album follows a similar socio-political track as Nausea, which isn't surprising. What is surprising is that two songs ("
Resurrection" and "
Dead Shall Rise") never had their lyrics printed with the album, and have never been publicized. The re-make of "
Dead Shall Rise" had most of the lyrics written anew for Tony Rezhawk's vocal style. I've not been able to discover why.
That aside, this album is one of few that I can listen to without skipping a song. While the next album would be the last to feature Jesse Pintado due to his death of diabetes complications a week after the release of "
Darker Days Ahead", subsequent recordings under the
Terrorizer moniker would never quite capture the intangible awesomeness of this debut.
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