Extreme music is full of legendary albums, but few carry the near mythical weight of Terrorizer’s World Downfall. Part of that status comes from the fact that it was essentially a one off: the original lineup existed just long enough to record the album, then dissolved before it could even be properly toured, as Pete Sandoval and David Vincent were absorbed into Morbid Angel. Terrorizer would later resurface in other forms, but World Downfall remained frozen in time, a singular document.
That is what made seeing Sandoval and Vincent together on stage, celebrating thirty five years of this grindcore landmark, feel genuinely unreal. This show marked the final night of a European tour shared with Possessed, themselves revisiting Seven Churches on its fortieth anniversary, that same album that coined the term death metal. Music once dismissed as too violent, too extreme, too crude to last has not only endured, it has become canon.
Hearing this modern classic played in full by two of the people who first laid it down on acetate all those years ago is exhilarating, but the weight of history alone is not enough to make an unforgettable show. Would new frontman Brian Werner in place of Oscar Garcia, himself gigging under a competing version of the band (Terrorizer L.A.), and guitarist Richie Brown replacing the tragically departed Jesse Pintado be up to the task? Would Terrorizer veterans Pete Sandoval and David Vincent, now approaching senior citizenship, still have the same fire, the same rage?
We needn't have worried: it took barely a few seconds for the band to erase any lingering doubt, unleashing a blast of volume and hostility that the crowd hurled straight back at them. Thoroughly primed by openers Ater, Nightfall and Suicidal Angel, the audience was already at boiling point. The band unfolded World Downfall in full and in sequence, with the intensity and feral urgency of a band less interested in commentary than in pure release, not speaking truth to power so much as screaming defiance into the abyss.
In an Electric Eye interview a few weeks prior, David Vincent remarked that Terrorizer’s music was, at its core, punk rock, and it is hard to argue with that assessment. If World Downfall is the manifesto, then these performances feel like the action that follows, the Molotov cocktail that the band and its fans are throwing at the musical establishment and society at large. The songs are short, direct and weaponized. Picking highlights is nearly pointless, but for this reviewer, "Corporation Pull-In" stood out, like on the record, a perfect distillation of the band’s approach, where punk, hardcore, thrash and death metal collide, driven by equal parts rage... and fun.
Because beneath the musical violence and cathartic aggression, or perhaps precisely because of it, this music is deeply fun. Much of the crowd hovered around their late forties and early fifties, some even beyond, yet they moshed, thrashed and celebrated with the same abandon as the younger contingent.
By the time the lights came up, La Machine was thoroughly ripped to shreds, its patrons stunned, as if thunderstruck, drenched in sweat, hoarse, disheveled and drained, like hordes of zombies, a scene from after world obliteration.
