Terrorizer - World Downfall (1989) Reviews

I know how important this album is. It's certainly one of the earliest grindcore albums along with Carcass, Repulsion and Napalm Death's work. It's also got some great musicianship, particularly by Pete Sandoval on drums from Morbid Angel. Some riffs are excellent and there are bunch of tracks I really dig, particularly After World Obliteration, Storm of Stress, Fear of Napalm, Enslaved by Propaganda, Dead Shall Rise and World Downfall. The problem with the album though is that after about 15 minutes all the tracks start to blend together. If I listen to 2 or 3 tracks, I think they're quite cool. But if I listen to the whole album straight, it just gets boring. The song structures and vocal patterns are similar throughout.

All up I think these guys found a great sound that would influence heaps of bands, and there are sections on World Downfall that are to be enjoyed, but this is just not an overly amazing album for me.

I quite like Grindcore but I wouldn't say I love it. I do however love World Downfall - it is one of my all-time favourite metal albums. Much as I enjoy some of Carcass and Napalm Death's earlier albums, when it comes to grindcore I would always reach for World Downfall first. I am not the most clued-in person when it comes to grind and death metal, but I feel that World Downfall is as much death metal as grindcore and comes across as the bastard child of Altars of Madness and Scum - and that is one hell of a lineage. It takes the punky energy of Discharge or Black Flag that has been transformed by being fed raw death metal riffs and shits out a heap of hyper-aggressive, brutal, but still somehow eminently catchy tracks that hit home like a jackhammer to the sternum. The Altars of Madness comparison is probably inevitable and understandable, as half the lineup of Terrorizer were also in Morbid Angel - bassist Dave Vincent and drummer Pete Sandoval (whose skinwork here sounds amazing). Vocalist Oscar Garcia sounds very much like Barney Greenaway with his deep, hoarse, bark/shout vocal delivery and guitarist Jesse Pintado unleashes brutalising riff after brutalising riff like a young Mike Tyson unleashed punches - and to a similar devastating effect.

To describe this as brutal and aggressive, although obviously factual, is to do it a great disservice. It's sixteen tracks are skillfully executed by guys who seriously know what they are about - which is its great strength as it prevents it from just deteriorating into a moshpit of identikit riffs, blastbeats and growls, but rather it is a precisely executed manifesto of intense extreme metal that would reverberate down through the decades and can still be held up as a masterclass in extremity. For the longest time this was Terrorizer's only full-length and stood as a monolithic testament to a short-lived, but extremely influential band of guys who reshaped extreme metal in their own image, being such an embodiment of metal extremity that a one-time popular extreme metal magazine even named itself after the band.  Despite reforming in the mid-2000's the shadow of World Downfall was long and they never approached this level of awesome again, but to have reached these heights even once is not to be easily dismissed. Unfortunately I never discovered World Downfall until much later, but I can only imagine the tear in the fabric of reality its discovery would have shown me had I come across it in 1989.

World Downfall is by far my favorite Grindcore album of the 80’s. It’s become really clear to me why most Grindcore doesn’t do it for me while Terrorizer kicks ass.

1. I don’t like silly/humorous music, which a fair portion of Grindcore is. This means lyrically and sonically – Terrorizer is full of hardcore riffs and angry, pessimistic messages that mesh well with the chaotic, manic wall of aggression.

2. Unlike most Punk genres, if you want to play Grindcore, you have to know how to play your instruments… Doing everything as fast as physically possible without having some amazing technique and precision just sounds awful. Terrorizer is full of extreme talent and capability. They nail everything they aim for and always sound precise (save the vocalist… more on that later).

3. If you want to play Grindcore, you need decent production. If you’re just going hard on every instrument as aggressively as possible, and you don’t have some sort of production job that can individualize those instruments, it just sounds like noise. World Downfall has some very good production without compromising the grit or making it sound clean. There is no sheen to it; simply a very good job of making sure every awesome riff is still audible over those pounding drums, and the bass gets some great treatment too.

There is one huge weakness here, else it would be a near perfect grind record. The vocalist.

I know what people say, “you don’t listen to extreme music for the vocals! It’s for the riffs!” Never for a second have I felt that way, and never have I understood it. If vocals are present, they matter, and if lyrics are present, they matter. They are pieces of the art that forms the whole.

The vocalist here doesn’t have a bad sound, and the lyrics are fine. The written lyrics are fine. The words that come out of the vocalist’s mouth hit about 50% of what’s written, 40% of the time shout random words or syllables that are not understandable, and 10% of the time completely skips a verse or chorus and says absolutely nothing. There are no full sentences or lines, at best a few of the words are launched out, sometimes not even in order. It’s like the vocalist had never seen the lyrics before, they just gave him a paper while they jammed and he decided to wing it.

Imagine if any other band member did that with their instrument. The album would sound like absolute crap. Why do vocalists get a pass? Not from me. Really drags down an otherwise top-notch grind album.