“Hold Fast, Don’t Fall Apart”: Terror’s Still Suffer
Reality check.
The first time I saw Terror live was in 2002 at a now-defunct venue in Savannah, GA, opening for or possibly touring with a band I have utterly forgotten. None of us attending the show knew who they were before their set. That set and the shirt and 7″ I bought are now the only things I remember from that night. (I’m still upset I didn’t snag the 4 Song Demo CD.) It is a rare thing to see a new band, know fully in that moment that this band will matter, and be right. Rarer still is that “being right” about Terror in 2002 cannot encompass the band’s career, spanning 24 years, 11 LPs, uncountable shows, and a type of steadfast influence on the scene enjoyed or earned by few others. Of course, once Lowest of the Low debuted in 2003 and was immediately followed up by One with the Underdogs in 2004 and Always the Hard Way in 2006, the question of Terror’s place in the pantheon of hardcore was settled. That 8 more albums have followed is a different kind of score settling. (One slight nit to pick: the version of “Out of My Face,” the hardest song ever, from the 7″ split with Ringworm is better than the version on Underdogs.) Along with marveling at the band’s discography while listening to the new album Still suffer, I’m even gobsmacked by the list of labels that have released Terror records: Bridge Nine, Trustkill, Lockin Out, Century Media, Victory, Reaper, Pure Noise, Deathwish, Takeover, Roadrunner, and now Flatspot. That that list isn’t even exhaustive is, again, representative of the ethos of the band. The Keepers of the Faith have worked with damn near everyone to keep alive that very faith.
Still Suffer, out today via the aforementioned Flatspot Records, is, like any Terror record, a classic Terror record. With Chris Linkovich (ex-Wrong Side, ex-Outbreak, Cruel Hand, ex-Bane) on bass, Jordan Posner (Millenial Reign, No Warning) and Martin Stewart (Donnybrook, Like It Or Not, God’s Hate, King Nine, and more) on guitars, Nick Jett (ex-Carry On, Donnybrook, Piece by Piece, Dem Nice on drums, and the inimitable Scott Vogel (Buried Alive, Despair, World Be Free, Slugfest, etc.) on vocals, the band is a scene unto themselves and still, somehow, indefatigable in their work. This particular iteration of Terror has been working together since at least 2017 when Linkovich joined the band for 2018’s Total Retaliation, producing what is I think the best Terror record in that time and maybe even since 2010’s Keepers of the Faith. Terror is still a band fighting, winning, and losing battles, a band still mired in the everyday realities of life and so eminently capable of capturing both the inevitabilities of victories and defeats and the raw human experience that is, whatever else it might be, an endless serpentining between those very inevitabilities. Terror understands what it is to be alive together and alive alone, if those are even separable categories.
And, really, they aren’t. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes, “Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire.” Even a cursory glance at Still Suffer reveals this tenuousness, this potential we, the constitutiveness of loss, the insuperability of human experiences. To Butler’s point, it’s the “Beauty in the Losses” that makes life what it is; it’s the “Death of Hope” that proves hope is something you previously had and might have again; it’s the tenuousness of that “we” that leads me to “Erase You From My World”; it’s the “Destruction of My Soul” that means it matters to me that I have a soul that can be destroyed, that can be rebuilt, and that ought to be protected. To “Still Suffer” can only really mean to still exist. Butler continues, “Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, expoed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.” Every Terror record, in some way, and Still Suffer very much at its core, is the exploration of the violence of that vulnerability.
That exploration takes shape over 10 tracks of hardcore once rooted in Vogel’s older bands Buried Alive and Despair and now honed to short outbursts of circle pits, two-steps, sing-alongs, gang vocals, and breakdowns. Stand out tracks like “Fear the Panic” and the aforementioned “Beauty in the Losses” feature excellent guest spots, changing the dynamic ever so slightly and making the record that much more exciting. Co-produced by Chad Gilbert (Shai Hulud, New Found Glory) and featuring Chuck-fucking-Ragan (Hot Water Music), “Fear the Panic” is Terror at its most resilient. “Nothing good lasts forever / It’s never coming back / Built up these walls of failure / One step forward, two steps back,” screams a forever-youthful Ragan before the song drops into a concrete-shattering stomp. On “Beauty in the Losses,” which opens with a beat produced by Jay Peta (Mindforce), Peta and Vogel bolster each other, two voices ripping out of the bleakness and offering you a hand. (That Vogel retracts that very hand in “Death of Hope” a track earlier before again offering it in “Beauty in the Losses” is precisely the point.) On closing track “Deconstruct It,” Vogel is joined by Brody King (God’s Hate) and Dan Seely (King Nine) for a final stand, a final, emphatic declaration of willpower and collective self-preservation. After a brief pause, the album comes to an end with a phone tap beat produced by Peta that can’t be anything but a direct nod to Cold World‘s legendary Dedicated to Babies Who Came Feet First. Memories are shared because, at bottom, Still Suffer is about those who are still suffering with and alongside us, those who were suffering with us then and still are now.
A final thought on the philosophy of Terror. In “To Hurt the Most,” a song that streamrolls its way to a No Warning-inspired two-step in all of 83 seconds, Vogel begins the song by asking, “What is trust when it’s not sacred?” In The Right to Oblivion, Lowry Pressly writes about how and why trust makes life meaningful. Following Emerson, Pressly writes, “What one trusts when one trusts oneself deeply is that inner quality of potentiality,” a quality that, for Pressly, means a clearing-away of all the rubbish that attempts to delimit how we experience ourselves and our lives. To be stripped of self-trust is to be stripped of what you might do, who you might become. This “form of self-trust grounded in oblivion helps us to deal with the pretty radical vulnerability of having a self at all,” Pressly continues, echoing Butler above. Further, “to the extent that the experience of being trusted [by others] is an important experience of personal development and moral self-worth,” we begin to see how this kind of social trust improves both our own sense of self and provides the foundation for a functioning society. “Being trusted by others,” Pressly argues, “gives us a sense of self-worth and self-respect because it connotes both a personal and generalized social judgement that we are deserving of trust.” Putting aside Pressly’s broader argument about what trust has to do with privacy and oblivion, it’s readily apparent that these forms of trust are and always have been integral to Terror. At the lowest of the low moments on Still Suffer, Vogel proclaims, “I am the sum of broken trust.” What makes this moment on the record so impactful is the degradation of the self. Still Suffer is vitriolic, vicious, broken-hearted, and devastated. It is a record that understands the importance of trust but seems entirely bereft of it. But if trust can make a tenuous we of us all, and if we have lost that trust, then it follows that we have trusted and been trusted before, and that we might even trust and be trusted again.
You just gotta “keep your head up straight.”
Still Suffer is out now via Flatspot Records.
The vinyl is gorgeous, the tape looks great,
the white tee and hoodie are undeniably sick.
Order somethin’!
