Luckily, no noses get punched, but cloaked insults decorate liner notes. Unfortunately, Roadracer was hoping for something more in line with the “popular” thrash of the day (see Extreme Aggression: zero bass and drums punching you in the nose), so Kurt begins butting heads with the label. All noses rejoice in safety.ġ988: Mind Wars gets more time and attention in multiple studios, resulting in a sound more suited to what Kurt and crew had in mind. Still, it’s enough to get the band to Europe opening for D.R.I., and it’s enough to get them recognized by R/C Records/Roadracer for a Stateside reissue of the record in 1988 and a U.S. The resulting sound is not exactly what Holy Terror was hoping to deliver. Bye-bye Jack Schwartz, hello Joe Mitchell.ġ987: Terror and Submission gets engineered by a guy who knows little-to-nothing about speed/thrash and mastered by the same dude who mastered Judas Priest’s Turbo. Killfelt boots Schwartz out of the band, Schwartz refuses to leave, Schwartz’s nose gets punched. Positive press develops, and unbeknownst to interested parties, Schwartz negotiates a deal with England’s Music for Nations/Under One Flag without bothering to mention it to the rest of the lads. Boom: Holy Terror is born.ġ986: As bands are wont to do, Holy Terror ships a cassette demo out to any and all ears willing to listen.
Vocalist Keith Deen eventually gets netted via an ad in a local LA rag. Friends talk to friends talk to friends, which brings Mike Alvord in as a second guitarist and Floyd Flanary (ex-Thrust) in on bass.
(assembled with help from the band’s website)ġ985: After getting punched in the nose by security at a show in San Pedro in support of Skeptics Apocalypse, Agent Steel guitarist Kurt “Kilfelt” Colfelt leaves the band to form Holy Terror alongside drummer Jack Schwartz, who’d recently been kicked out of Dark Angel following the release of We Have Arrived. A Somewhat Summarized History and Account of Several Punches To the Nose However, if you’ve somehow managed to remain oblivious to the band’s work over the years, or if you’re the type who enjoys taking a walk down memory lane in a pair of beat-up, puffy high-tops… There is no remastering or bonus material here it simply takes everything the band delivered from 1987, 19 and puts it into a convenient pile. How necessary the collection is depends entirely on whether or not you have the first two albums and the El Revengo comp, and whether or not those copies have managed to survive extensive use over the years. This latest compilation via Dissonance Productions (also responsible for Holy Terror guitarist Mike Alvord’s latest band, Mindwars) collects everything the band has delivered, minus Dark Descent’s vinyl remaster of their 1986 demo and three live shows via 2015’s Guardians of the Netherworld: A Tribute to Keith Deen, and puts it all into one extremely affordable compact disc boxset. Label: Dissonance Productions.Terror and Submission and Mind Wars are both great underground works in the speed/thrash realm, and they’ve seen official (fairly limited) runs on LP, cassette and CD through approximately six different labels over three decades. Therefore, it remains vital that the great works always have a means of getting into the people’s hands, even if the amount of hands isn’t as many as we’d like them to be. Sure, it won’t remodel the guest bathroom, but knowing that you’ve created something that’s truly revered and serves as a compelling influence for others moving forward-that’s the sort of thing that makes the heart swell during those quiet, reflective hours. A band such as this probably didn’t pull in a lot of cheddar for all their efforts in 1987/88, and the likelihood that yet another repress of two classic records will net the surviving members anything more than a week’s worth of coffee seems equally improbable.īut let’s not minimize the value of esteem. But Holy Terror’s relatively brief stop under the accent lights of center stage happened so long ago, and today’s culture throws so many new bands into listeners’ ears every week that trying to get the crew their proper due thirty years later almost seems futile. This raises the question: If you spend enough time being considered underrated by more and more people over time, won’t you eventually become, you know, not underrated? Perhaps. Ask any encyclopedic heavy metal relic trundling through the streets who he/she would pick as the 80s Most Underrated Thrash Band and you’ll inevitably end up with a stack of votes thrown toward LA’s Holy Terror.
0 kommentar(er)
