In 1989 future Napalm Death guitarist Jesse Pintado, Nausea vocalist Oscar Garcia, Morbid Angel bassist/vocalist David Vincent and Morbid Angel drummer Pete Sandoval recorded the single greatest grindcore album of all time; Terrorizer’s World Downfall. It was truly one of the most innovative and destructive slabs of grindcore ever recorded, with fast blasting beats, shredding riffs and deep growls with a perfect production.

For years there were rumors the band was planning on reforming and for years nothing became of it until finally, in 2006, Jesse Pintado and Pete Sandoval got together and teamed up with former Monstrosity guitarist Tony Norman and Resistant Culture vocalist Anthony Rezhawk and put together the first Terrorizer full length recording in 17 years titled Darker Days Ahead.

While the idea of a reformation of Terrorizer was exciting, the material the “new” Terrorizer created fails to live up to the hype. Darker Days Ahead contains 12 tracks of raw death grind featuring tons of blast beats, razor sharp riffs and harsh guttural growls. The songs are fast and violent with a thick meaty bass tone and the material is played by three of the best musicians in the underground metal scene, unfortunately, their songwriting efforts were mediocre at best.

From the opening riff on the title track to the final drum beat on "Victim Of Greed", Darker Days Ahead reeks of familiarity. The material, while played with a ton of passion, comes across as sounding very uninspired. Every riff has been played a thousand times before by countless bands leading up to this release and every drum pattern has been done before. The end result sounds like a group of guys who got together on a weekend and decided to quickly write and record a grindcore effort and it just falls flat.

The production is terrible, the distortion and bass set to the max giving the material the sound of a lo-fi goregrind release. The drums have a very raw sound as well often sounding more like a drum machine than the death metal legend Pete Sandoval behind the kit. The vocals of Anthony Rezhawk are fucking annoying, it sounds like Piotr Wiwczarek from Vader with a cold. The vocal patterns are awful, Rezhawk barks his way through the album while rarely following the flow of the instruments.

If it were just one or two of these issues, Darker Days Ahead would be a solid grindcore release, but when you add up all of the flaws it quickly makes the effort painful to listen to. What Terrorizer need to do is to head back into the studio and remix and remaster the album; clean up that shitty guitar tone, fix the crappy drum sound and get Oscar Garcia or David Vincent back to re-record the vocals and you’d have a pretty good death grind album, but Darker Days Ahead, in it’s current state, sucks.

I’ve listened to World Downfall well over a thousand times over the past 19 years (I’m reviewing this in 2008), I’ve listened to all of the releases by Nausea, I own all of the Terrorizer and Nausea demos, including the split demo release, and Darker Days Ahead is simply not Terrorizer. That’s fine, but even if they were to release this album under a different name it wouldn’t change the fact that the album just isn’t good.

I really want to like Darker Days Ahead, but I don’t. I’m pretty bummed to know that this is the final chapter in Jesse Pintado’s legacy, he died just 5 days after it’s release and everyone knows he’s done much better than this and, had he not passed away due to diabetes-related complications, he would absolutely have surpassed this in his future recordings.

While I can’t recommend Darker Days Ahead, I do recommend everyone check out Terrorizer’s original material from the late 80’s, especially World Downfall. If you haven’t heard it, you need to check it out. I’m not kidding when I say it’s the greatest grindcore album of all time, it’s really that good!

Written By: Teufel