Review Summary: Total Extermination of half-decent music maybe
Total Extermination is a 29 minute escapade of trash. Through a surprisingly eclectic mix of death, thrash, and black metal, Exterminator uses their 1987 album to shock the listener but fails miserably, leaving an album devastated by absolutely awful production qualities, boring song structures, monotonous, and at times, reckless, directionless instrumentation, and one of the least remarkable metal vocalists in the history of the genre.
While it’s the norm for black metal bands to incorporate messy and seemingly poor recording and production qualities in their music, this album reflects some of the least valuable qualities ever finished within a music studio. The first thing even the most experienced black metal enthusiast while notice about this record is how obnoxious and trashy the record sounds. The vocals are constantly given excessive amounts of reverb and echo, making what is already an indiscernible listening experience into an absolutely nonsensical display of random growls and yells. The guitars consistently fade in and out of the mix, and there is no way to discern bass from the rest of the mix. Instead lies an unending wall of guitar distortion that at times engulfs the entire mix and other times is completely inaudible – and for seemingly no reason. Guitar leads are given way too much high end, resulting in a screeching and painful scream.
Every last song here sounds just like the last. Repetitive and extremely bland drumming fails to push along any sort of rhythm and a wall of fuzz fades in and out and sometimes waves up and down in pitch – apparently without any sort of direction or meaning. Sometimes a guitar lead will chime in, but it’s almost like guitarists “Freddy Krueger” (his actual moniker) and Tom Stock decided to use one boring, poorly produced b-string squeal that fails to go anywhere interesting and placed it in random parts throughout the whole album. Other times vocalist Tom would belch wordless burps…yeah.
This record is laughable. The cover art is some sort of reference to torture and Nazism, but the only torture I can find here is the horror of actually listening to this thing. The production is god-awful, the instrumentation could have been played better by middle school bands, and the songwriting could’ve been improved by any generic deathcore band in exist. Stay away from this.
