Review Summary: The apex of generic 80s black and thrash metal.
Despite 1987 being loaded with many intense and innovative thrash metal albums from several continents, it was not without thrash and speed metal albums that were littered with flaws, Exterminator’s sole studio album Total Extermination being a crystal clear example of how bad both thrash metal and black metal can really become. Throughout the slightly sub-half hour runtime of this atrocity are clear signs of talent, but they are ultimately squandered courtesy of several terrible traits plaguing the listening experience that makes it stick out from the vast majority of New World thrash releases of 1987 like a rotting rat in a prestigious ballroom.
The largest flaw of this album is obvious from the first few seconds of the first song, which is the abominable production, and not the type of bad black metal production an album of a band like Burzum or old-school Bathory contains. This atrocious type of low budget and lo-fi production is not the type that works in union with the extreme vocals and riffs of those black metal godfathers to create a twisted and outright sinister atmosphere that black metal has built upon since the glory days of Venom. Rather, the production of this release is so muddy that it at times renders the notes of the guitar and bass virtually incomprehensible. The bass is scarcely audible on this entire album, to the point where the lousy production kept me guessing as to which string instrument was which. The muddy nature of the production badly obscured the pitches of the power chords in a way that makes the production on St. Anger sound as polished as Queen’s A Night at the Opera. This is easily the worst production job I have heard in music history, and that is competing with the demo coming from a massively obscure local Maryland deathcore band.
Vocalist/guitarist Tom Stock, while a technically serviceable thrash guitarist, played riffs on this travesty like he never heard a good metal riff in his entire life. During the occasional time when the riffs are discernible, they consist of two or three generic power chords with almost no variation, or four chords at best. The marriage of his riffs with the garbage production often makes the lower pitched guitar sounds seem more like burps than actual chord progressions. The generic and overly simplistic nature of these muddy riffs makes even the most uninspired riff in the entire AC/DC discography sound like the motif of a Beethoven masterpiece. Add the extremely repetitive nature of these historically bland riffs, and they present guitar work that could eventually send Cassius and Judas in the eighth layer of Hell to brand new levels of madness.
Stock shows himself in the guitar solos to have a good degree of technical skill, but his solos are the most by-the-numbers pentatonic runs that are severely lacking a unique identity in the same way pentatonic solos from contemporaries such as Anthrax, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, and fellow Brazilians Sepultura have one. There is almost no additional color to these archetypal thrash solos from other techniques such as tremolo picking or finger tapping, making this album’s lead guitar work more homogenous than any Slayer release ever. Not helping this issue is Stock’s vocal style being an extremely poor man’s Chuck Schuldiner at best and borderline unlistenable at worst.
The only real redeeming factor to this album are the drumbeats, which are rather relentless, if somewhat repetitive. Drummer “Executor” has a style comparable to Hellhammer’s beats on the Mayhem debut, just toned down a little on the speed. It is a shame to see such a great player being wasted on arguably the most generic thrash album in history. The mercifully short length also aids in preventing this black mark on thrash and black metal from being an atrocity on the level of near universally hated albums such as Illud Divinum Insanus and Dedicated to Chaos. This blatant display of squandered potential has had its musical features executed massively greater by both contemporaries (Bathory, Sepultura, Death, and others) and future acts (Burzum, Mayhem, Havok, to name a few), and provides very little in terms of worthwhile listening to even the most hardcore of speed metal freaks.
