After destroying eardrums worldwide with Endless Pain and Pleasure to Kill, Kreator unleashed Terrible Certainity, a record which quite possibly is Germany's quintessential thrashterpiece. All elements are represented here... chaotic drumming, precise riffage, apocalyptic lyrics and Mille's razorblade vocal delivery... not to mention great cover art and excellent songwriting.

Much more refined and smoothed over than previous releases, Terrible Certainity still remains caustic, with songs like Storming With Menace and the title track thrashing hard enough to rip any wayward metalhead a new one. The fretwork is technical without being pretentious and every song is a keeper.

Basically this album sums up what late 80s thrash is all about and belongs in any professed metalhead's collectin.

Kreator's early beginnings showed the band as a reckless musical unit, inspired by dark groups like Venom and Mercyful Fate, and heavy fast rock acts like Motorhead. their first few albums were crude, but showed a great technical skill and a flair for writing some pretty cool riffs. well, one listen to Terrible Certainty and it becomes perfectly clear why this band has earned it's place in the pantheon of classic thrash! this album is full of non-stop blistering songs that attack the listener with calculated speed and plenty of whiplash tempo changes. the vocals sound fierce and fit the flow of the speed perfectly. the band sounds tighter than ever before and the production is great! the guitar solos are still kind of raw and don't always add the kind of depth and melodic drama that most of their American contemporaries would pull off; but the Terrible Certainty solos sound a little bit better than on past albums. one thing i have also always loved about this album is the creepy cover art, showing two rows of skeletal religious figures along a bridge that leads to a towering demon figure with glaring eyes. awesome concept and this cover was the main reason why i bought this album in the first place (well...it was a cassette tape when i first bought this back in the day). this was actually the first Kreator album i ever bought and it remains my favorite to this day. a totally essential and monumentally inspiring thrash album of very high calibur!

This album is raw, catchy, fast, furious, more raw than the album after "Extreme Aggression" Mille's bark on this one is frightning, and rules, theres not much to say about this one, every song is a keeper, not one bad tune, 36 minutes of pure mayhem, buy it!

Just about any list of the best late 80's/early 90's thrash probably includes: Sepultura - Beneath The Remains, Any Metallica Before the Black Album, Napalm Death - Harmony Corruption, SOD - Speak English or Die, Slayer - Reign in Blood/South of Heaven, and Kreator - Terrible Certainty.

The best way to describe Kreator's tracks are pure agression. Heavy riffs are pointless without good arrangement - and Kreator comes close to Metallica in arrangement for maximum impact. Mille's terse, growling, staccato vocals sound almost demonic. They even write some catchy lyrics.

I forget when I first heard of Kreator, but the first time I actually heard their music was when I saw them open for DRI at the Celebrity Theater in Anaheim. It must have been 1988, because my recollection is that DRI had just released 4 Of A Kind. In those days I still had at least a slight preference to the hardcore side of crossover, as opposed to the metal side. I didn't check out every thrash metal band that came down the pike. With few exceptions, most of them just sounded to me like Judas Priest at 45 RPM. Anyway, I remember watching Kreator take the stage and digging their sound pretty much the instant it hit my eardrums. Thrash isn't just about speed- I prefer it as hard and dark and violent as possible, and they delivered on all fronts. I don't remember anything about DRI that night, they had been completely blown off the stage. Actually I do remember it was during DRI's set that a bouncer picked up a very young stage diver, held him up high and then slammed him down on the front of the stage really hard, and from the look on the kid's face it was obvious it hurt him a lot. The crowd erupted into angry "BOOO!"s and I pushed forward as far as I could and repeatedly spat on the bouncer until another bouncer blind-sided me and knocked me into to a couple of other bouncers and they pounded on me for a bit. Then they let me go, didn't kick me out. Good times!

The next day I went to the record store and went straight to K and grabbed Kreator's most recent release, which was Terrible Certainty. I put it on and thought "Oh yeah, this is exactly what I heard last night." Soon after that I bought all of their previous releases, and I grabbed Extreme Aggression as soon as it was out, and I loved it all. But Certainty was always my favorite. Their previous album Pleasure to Kill is a very close second place, though I know a lot of Kreator fans prefer it. I forget the name of the album they put out after Extreme Aggression, but it must have really stank it because I never went back. I'm a fickle SOB.

Off the top of my head as I sit here writing this, there are only two thrash metal albums I would rate higher:

Slayer- Reign In Blood

Dark Angel- Darkness Descends