Terror

Thrasher Magazine, Dec, 2003 by Oakland L. Childers

ANY HARDCORE BAND WORTH ITS SALT has a tough row to hoe. With the genre now over 20 Fears old, there's not a lot that hasn't been said, and not too many ways left to say it. Basically, a band has two choices--get a gimmick or find a way to make a sometimes-stale musical genus fresh again. LA's Terror definitely falls into the latter category. With more zeal than most of its contemporaries, Terror is striking fear into the hearts of other less diligent hardcore bands. This band has the sound, the passion, and the work ethic to turn the attention of even the most fickle fan squarely toward its stage.

The hype around Terror built quickly. If the band were a baby, its parents would still be counting their little bundle of joy's age in months. It's surprising then to hear the group's debut EP, Lowest of the Low (Bridge Nine), as solid and hard hitting a hardcore record as anything its long-toothed predecessors are capable of, Within three months of its first practice, Terror played a first show, put out a demo, and crept out of the San Fernando Valley and into the forefront of the hardcore scene. What got people's attention so quickly is the unmistakable style Terror brings to the form.

"I can't really define what our style is," Jones says. "We're just doing our own thing as well as getting some influences from other bands that we listen to and really like. There's a lot of" bands out there that just rip off other bands and they're just content with doing that, whereas we'll get our influence from other bands and we'll put our own flare to it, our own style. So we're not just a band ripping off two or three other bands without bringing anything new"

Jones and the other members of Terror have their work cut out for them. Convincing gimmick-weary hardcore kids your band has anything new to offer is like selling snake oil. Being good at anything takes a lot of work, but tastefully reinterpreting something that's been done to death takes brains and more than a little resolve.

"It gets harder every time, with every song we write, because every thing's been done already," Jones says. "As hardcore gets older there's less and less variety of things you can do. You can always incorporate new styles into music, but all the riffs are getting used. Hardcore always has to be fresh and new. Everything can't all sound the same." For Terror that means keeping the tempo up and the bullshit to a bare minimum.

"We just want to have the highest energy we possibly can," Jones says. "When something doesn't flow and it's not energetic, it's just boring and bland and there's nothing to it.

Jones says the band works hard to continually hone its sound, while always sidestepping the pitfalls that so many other bands wander blindly into.

"There's a lot of bands around in hardcore that have gimmicks, whether it be fashion or a stupid topic to sing about that they always use in all their songs," Jones says. "We have our core of what we want to sound like and what kind of hardcore we want to play, and we have our influences and we just build our own style into it. We always try to progress and try to do better."

Part of the machinery driving Terror's fresh faced approach to this sometimes-tired game is the disparity in the age of its members. At 30, singer Scott Vogel was already floor punching and stage diving at shows when Jones was still in elementary school. The divide between the band member's ages provides a unique opportunity for ingenuity that is not lost on Jones.

"It's pretty cool because we have pretty young members and older members," he says. "We all get along together, on matter how old we are. in the real world it's kind of unheard of for a 35-year-old to be hanging out with a 20-year-old. But in hardcore it's fine No matter how old or young you are you can always get together with people and be able to relate."

The chemistry within Terror is palpable, and Jones and his band-mates aren't oblivious to it. They feel the same thing the crowd feels.

"There's some bands you see on stage--their record might crush, but onstage they aren't all feeling it together," Jones says. "They look like they're all over the place and they don't look like their energy is flowing together. I'm in a band with four other guys who, our ideas and what we think about music and how it should be played, click. I can't find that with a lot of other people."

What it all boils down to is that Terror is a band whose members have a deep knowledge and appreciation for the kind of music they play, and they play what they like. Who better to lead the next wave of hardcore?

"We're pretty confident in ourselves that whatever we do we'll like it," Jones says. "That's what really matters, what it really comes down to-we like what we do and we would never do something we don't want to do. I don't really care about what people think. If they don't like it then that's tough shit. We do what we do."

Check out Terror's new four-song split with Ringworm, out on Deathwish Records, or catch the band on tour with Throwdown Terror's first full-length is due out on Bridge Nine early next year.