Violent Termination

Listened to the demos of the other Devastation, the Chicago-based ones, and their continuation Sindrome the other night, and this inspired, also quite proficient old school proto-death/thrashing compelled me to reach out for the recordings of the act here… started with “Idolatry” naturally, this prime piece of elemental retro thrash asskickery; passed through it twice, before I carried on with “Signs of Life”, the sophomore, another admirable bash… and then I wrapped it on with the album reviewed here. Or at least tried to wrap it on as I couldn’t sit through the entire 37-min… and started to wonder how stubborn the completist side of my persona must have been once upon a time, to persuade me to keep this.

This is one of the examples when the album-title boisterously walks ahead of the content, trying to sell it based on scary tactics alone. Or, maybe the guys were already entertaining terminating their activities violently, not happy with the final product… said product largely borrowed from the two demos before it. Sloppy patchy debuts were something commonplace for the early/mid-80’s, but for 1987 first instalments based on mere naked enthusiasm and maddening barely-sensible barrage, and very little else… nah, those couldn’t pass anymore… no pasaran.

The plodding one-dimensional bash on ample display here begins with the opening ”Massive Devastation” and never lets go, the guys throwing fast semi-amateurish riff-work, short screamy leads, and a thundering bass bottom on every composition, the latter ingredient the main claim at at least semi-professionalism. Rodney Dunsmore runs his own show behind the mike with mean but bleak unexciting semi-recitals, only occasionally checking with his colleagues as to how he should proceed; the thing is that he doesn’t need to do those check-ups on very regular bases provided that the music flows in exactly the same vein from beginning to end, the obligatory mid-paced passages ponderous stopovers that have very few redeeming qualities, the more volatile less rigid structure of the nervy title-track ensuring there’ll be a highlight here. “Death Is Calling” is the other place where the guys stir something more meaningful, surely aware of the spawning death metal movement, but hardly interested in jumping head-on into it as what they’ve cooked here can pass for thrash, proto-death, hardcore… and anything in-between.

This isn’t exactly messy or chaotic, but is so monotonously boring that one really has to find a very good reason as to why he/she would want to last through the whole thing. The guys were apparently warming up for bigger exploits, but this first outing of theirs didn’t give anyone any hopes that these musicians’ endeavours would be worth lending an ear in the future. And it’s not even very passionate this samey melee; it sounds like the band had a recipe to follow but since their musical proficiency wasn’t up there yet, they’d voted to not deviate from it with even a single note; it’d better sound mechanical and uneventful than disorganized and weird. The other picking point is that the guys never even tried to bring the level up from the demos; they served the same cuts, in the same way, with the same deep underground mindset… an illustration of laziness this… or a sign of firm belief in the qualities of their product? Cause if it’s the latter, guess someone had lied to the lads big time back then… he’d pulled their leg from here to the South Pole and back.

Whoever’d poured his/her criticism over the band after this, had done a great service to them as two years later they were fully revitalized, producing much better old school thrash, a huge jump in every department which did bring them closer to the genre’s finest; a place they very richly won themselves with the grand third instalment. Evolution very handsomely achieved in this camp, where I’m sure everyone fondly remembers those days, when the creation of barely sensible barrage was an act of determination, self-fulfilment and a burning desire to violently exterminate all sophisticated, polished posers.

For such a huge state, I always felt like the Texas thrash scene was rather on the small side through the 80s. Sure, there was Cowboys from Hell in 1990 which was one of the biggest albums ever, and then you had a few cool bands like Rigor Mortis, Watchtower , Gammacide, and Agony Column, but there was no California/Bay Area-level explosion; a lot of it was no doubt relegated to an underground of demo hopefuls. One other band that achieved a fairly high visibility, but then fizzled out with the genre was Devastation, who released two strong albums through Combat, and really seemed to hit with the fans of that more excessive, aggressive side of thrash metal circa Dark Angel or Morbid Saint. But before we can get to that good stuff, there was Violent Termination, an album that sounds right in line with their speed and lethality, but one so rough around the edges that most feel it should probably remain forgotten...

And I don't necessarily disagree with that assessment, I just think I've probably heard worse. This album definitely sounds like a clunker in which the band really hadn't learned to gel together yet, but there are some positives to it, like the raw, scrapyard production aesthetics that make the guitars sound like they are being played in a studio full of rusted barrels and abandoned sheet metal. The riffs themselves aren't even all that bad if you're a fan of the Slayer school of nasty speed, but they tend to get lost a little under the trash can drumming, the fat, burping bass-lines and the unfortunate vocals. To be clear, Rodney was the front man on all three of their albums, but they just don't have that explosive, splattered vibrancy that he would adopt on Signs of Life. They instead feel like dull barking, with lines that syllabically don't even match up with the riffs half the time. I can kind of hear the comparable tone in his timbre somewhere, but if anything, you'd have to give him a reward for the most improved member as the band, 3/4ths of which appear on all three of their albums.

Sometimes the amateur rawness on these old thrash albums had a lot of charm to it, like Sepultura or Sodom on their early releases, but Violent Termination is just too dull. The riff patterns are certainly identifiable as a vicious brand of thrash, but the way the vocals are slung together, and the rather awkward mix of the drums leech of them of some of that potential nastiness we love from this old shit. You can clearly hear some of those Slayer influences, or even some Celtic Frost on the grooves of "Syndrome of Terror", but a lot of the writing is bland and half-formed, the vocals a little too loud, and the guitars, which were at this point clearly the most energized and competent part of the band, just don't stick the landing on a lot of tracks. The leads are spurious and appropriately whip-like in tunes such as "Death is Calling", and I kind of like the raucous tone on the guitars, it gets me pumped up but then there is simply no payoff. The lyrics are also comparable to a lot of other bands at the time, so there's no real problem in that area.

Ultimately, though, Violent Termination winds up sounding like an overlong demo from the average thrash band which jams over in that garage on your street corner, and listens to all the right shit, but has yet to really forge its own worthwhile identity or master playing together. I don't want to be too hard on it, because we all know in hindsight that they were about to quickly meet those goals, but this one's very much skippable, even if you're in the market for some of the crudest, most 'real' thrash and speed metal from the old times.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Forming in 1986, the year considered by many thrash metal's heyday (I find this statement somewhat superficial, but that's another story), Texas' Devastation promptly assigned themselves the task of carving their place in the scene with a rather unimaginative moniker. Propelled by the passion only four young guys can have, the band immediately started working on their first songs, a couple demos and soon landed a deal to release their debut album, in the lapse of just one year. You probably haven't heard much said about this ostensibly legendary debut, but many things are forgotten for a reason, so...

Do you know about Devastation because of their later works? You'll be surprised by how unspectacular Violent Termination is. The average tempo is not remarkably fast, their first drummer Jesse Lopez mostly reminds me of Razor's Mike Embro in the sense that he constantly switches between the same two or three tempos and uses the same two or three fills between them, but at least he tries to adopt some alternative solutions from time to time, like some proto blast-beats thrown in in 'Syndrome of Terror''s fast parts, without too much care for patterns, or in the central outbreak of the closer 'Beneath the Surface'. Dave Burk would pen some of my favourite riffs and solos in the future, but here, without his partner in crime Henry Elizondo, he can't emerge from the general mediocrity. He's still the most talented guy in the band, even if here it's not strictly meant as a compliment: anyway, the intro of 'Death Is Calling' is a proof of that, even if a sad exception, and some riffs are not total throwaways, though often teasing you for the first 30 seconds and then giving space to midtempo verses which kill the little interest one may develop. The leadwork would later benefit from the addition of some variety and even a touch of melody, for now resting more or less comfortably in short shredding outbursts that are also very alike-sounding. Add some unsurprisingly rough transactions between all of the above and you've got the picture.

I could find no other place to put this, but 'Insanity', despite its not so bad riff interchange, sounds basically like a punk song, and that alone should tell you more than something... we're dealing with still immature stuff.

Rodney Dunsmore's vocals on Violent Termination deserve a special mention in the sense that they may be some of the worst I've ever heard put to tape. There's no worst offender between the tracks, but that means more strictly that he's constantly offending throughout the whole duration of the album. Okay, maybe the most laughable instance it's that 'You must die by my hand tonight' in 'Syndrome of Terror', spoken with the same energy of an octogenarian who just got out of bed. Overall, it's a deadly cocktail of speaking-like cadence, wavering volume, and apparent total lack of conviction, with a topping of some amateurish harsher moments thrown in in casual instances. I sometimes try to imagine this album with decent vocals for scientific purposes, and it may even be worth a 40-50%, they're that bad... honestly spending too much time making fun of them, seeing how the band would become later, would make me sad, but alas, guess everybody's gotta start somewhere, and they were too impatient to get their first work published to care about it.

Not forgetting how often bad vocals are accompanied by bad lyrics, obviously. Truth be told, they're probably more cliché than outright bad, especially regarding the song titles, but the world would see a lot of improvements on this aspect as well. On the upside, considering also how bad Devastation's demos sound, Violent Termination's production is far from offensive, and I honestly appreciated the old school, gritty sound of the guitar and the strong bass tone, unfortunately not backed up by adequate riffing. If it wasn't for the fluctuating volume of the vocals, which I wouldn't impute to the mixing as much as to Dunsmore's trainwreck of a performance, no problems at all for a minor debut. Curiously enough, this album was released by the small Zombo Records, a label whose only other release was another debut... slightly more promising (Watchtower's Energetic Disassembly). Still, they earned a deal with the omnipresent Combat for the sophomore. Well played, guys.

All in all, Violent Termination may be considered as a motivation for young bands to see how much a group of people can improve and refine their sound with the adequate dose of passion, in the span of just 2 (or better, 4) years. Had the band decided to rework some of the songs in future releases, maybe as bonus tracks, I wouldn't have disapproved, since after all 'Beneath the Surface''s aforementioned acceleration strikes pretty hard, and some slower parts work better like the refrains of 'Innocent Submission' or 'Meet Your Maker' (just listen how finer the latter sounds only a year later, presumably with Louie Carrisalez behind the drumkit, on the Idolatry reissue's live bonus tracks); but for the history books, it's undoubtedly better for all mankind that they discarded everything regarding this phase and moved on to greener (actually violent) pastures.

“…here me now these words of creed, your mind and body are what I need…”

Devastation’s debut flunks out of the Texan school of thrash even harder than Anialator’s clunkers do. While treating aggression & intensity as a reward for the listener rather than an obligation of the band, the four-piece schleps through ten tracks while tripping over every cliché known to the style, starting with the trinity of moniker, title & song names. Sure, there were plenty of mid/late-'80s thrash acts that couldn’t find an original idea even if they were giving Salvadore Dali a piggyback ride, but at least some of them could perform with more enthusiasm than a slow roll through a car wash.

Blindly boring (meaning it’s boring and they didn’t seem to notice), Devastation pierce the style’s skin only to dry hump it, the captivation between the two so noncommittal they may as well be on a treadmill striding with the same unchanging view. Actually, that’s exactly what they do. “Massive Devastation” (which starts with yer typically windblown acoustic intro called...gasp...“The Beginning of the End”), “Meet Your Maker”, “Insanity”, “Syndrome of Terror”…in a nutshell, every song except possibly the first fifteen semi-alluring seconds of “Death is Calling” & the title cut (which still spends a lot of time floundering) shows the world this was a band not yet worthy of the dotted line.

Like the production, the percussion is stiff & robotic, meanwhile the lyrics are an uncovered yawn (see the overview blurb for honor roll English skills), then while Dave Burk’s solos have a certain churlish abandon (somewhat of a high point, modestly speaking), the biggest downfall of this record is easily the pinched, colorless & practically catatonic throat of Rodney Dunsmore. No, the vocals aren’t just weak in the knees, they’re quadriplegic & I look more lovingly upon my dripping faucet than this eighth cousin to Steve Souza.

On the upside, the band does get a lot better (I can’t imagine two more steamers like this from the same band, though Anialator come close with two) as they say adios to stiff-armed Jesse Lopez & hola to second guitarist Henry Elizondo for a sophomore effort showing many more signs of life. No one shot Dunsmore, though.