In 1994, Dazzling Killmen, a quartet from the St. Louis area named after a line in an obscure, grotesque 1963 short story by Lucas Samaras, put out a record called Face of Collapse, their second and final full-length. By the following year, they had broken up.

Face of Collapse is a milestone for underground extreme rock in the '90s and should be experienced by fans of everything from Slint to the Dillinger Escape Plan to Rush. In fact, there would be no Converge, Today is the Day or Dillinger Escape plan without this essential

blueprint.

As former Rolling Stone senior editor Hank Shteamer wrote, “No other music that I know of can deliver what this [music] delivers, either emotionally — its specific combination of creeping dread, frantic anxiety and seething rage — or sonically: The grand, gothic power chords at the outset, sounding like some horror-movie overture. The thresher-like riff that follows, and then, the onset of one of the greatest sequences of aggressive