Terror – Rhythm Amongst The Chaos

Musical tastes change over time; I say this because I used to really like Terror. I reviewed their last album shortly after it came out; a decent album by all rights, but looking back I gave it way more credit than it deserved. It was more or less a continuation of One With The Underdogs (an album that really should get some credit for somewhat defining a sub-genre). Recently, I also decided to download some Obituarysongs just because I`ve heard people mention that the two bands are quite similar. What I learned from listening to Obituary is that if you could take their musical element and let Scott Vogel front it; essentially, it would be Terror. My point being that Terror more or less plays metal.

There were a couple things that really put me off Terror; the tough-guy attitude and my constantly changing musical tastes, I will address the former. When the majority of a bands music is dedicated to “throwing down” and other generally silly mosh parts, the music gets a bit ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with people “moshing,” I just think it hits a point where it gets stupid. For instance; when a guy is spin kicking people trying to watch a show, that’s lame. Crowd-walking/running; it looks super cool (there’s a Nora video on the Trustkill site where a guy crowd-runs and gets unbelievably far; it’s generally the only thing I’d recommend going to the Trustkill site to see) but it’s not so cool if your head gets stepped on. If you like to windmill at shows or punch nothing in particular, more power to you, but I digress. This bands music has not changed a bit, the biggest difference from their early material is the bass drum wasn’t mixed out or watered down on the tracks, but emphasized instead.

Rhythm Amongst the Chaos may just sound like any another Terror record with their blatant Hatebreed similarities, but they did really step up their lyric writing. As opposed to the misanthropy and metaphors/blatant statements about fighting anyone/thing oppressing them, the lyrics are somewhat existentialist and critical of oneself (oneself being whomever wrote them). I’m sure this won’t destroy the bands “tough-guy” image, but at least they seem to be trying. They also cover a Breakdown song, it’s pretty good (just thought I’d throw that little piece of information in).

If you really like Terror, there’s no reason you shouldn’t get this. This album is just like every other album the band has released. If you don’t like Terror, don’t buy this because of the aforementioned reason. It’s nothing really that special, plus EP’s seem to fetch a price only a couple dollars less than a full-length in CD stores.