Dazzlingkillmen & The Kronk men

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 rock music I’ve ever heard: a sort of 

hypnotic death waltz… broken up by racing, scampering full-band interludes and giving way to a 

deranged, writhing climax — with the guitars stabbing at oblique angles over the rhythm 

section’s lockstep convulsions — that feels at once vise-tight and completely unhinged. When 

the whole band kicks into the next breakneck triplet riff, the effect is one of complete 

information overload.”

For the first time in 30 years, you’re going to be able to hear this music live