- Slowly digging themselves out of the musical underground since 1992, Terror Squad
(not to be
- confused with the New York-based hip hop crew of the same name) is a 4-piece group consisting of fire-breathing screamer
SonicRiot, drum basher Frankensteiner, guitar shredder Lord of Nightmare
, and brutality bassist Anarchy Beast (who would not be officially recruited until the year 2000).
Struggling to gain notoriety as an antithesis to the gender-bending glitter of Japan’s visual kei movement (which has launched the careers
of internationally successful bands like Dir en Grey and Gackt), the members of Terror Squad put their bruised
and battered heads together to create their debut CD, “The Wild Stream of Eternal Sin.” This 7-track album,
which came out back in 1999 through the super-indie label WorldChaos, is a blistering high-speed package of primal thrash punk injected
with enough adrenaline and male testosterone to feed an entire mosh pit of trigger happy beer monkeys. As sweaty and obnoxious as it
could possibly get from beginning to end, “Wild Stream” is a boozy sonic blitz shot in full throttle.
A really good thing about Terror Squad is how they can deliver back-breaking songs in the English language
without sounding incredibly silly or banal (unlike the more radio-friendly EZO and Loudness who were so popular two decades before
when hair-glam metal ruled the charts). Although I personally would prefer to indulge myself in the beauty and complexity of Japanese lyrics,
the anti-social anthems of “Wild Stream” do act as an exception. So whether you are drawing a blood red pentagram
on your living room floor, driving your car up to 100 MPH in a midnight drag race, or planting a pipe bomb in your local discotheque,
Terror Squad’s “Wild Stream of Eternal Sin” can easily be enjoyed as the latest soundtrack of dangerous youth anarchy.
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