Album Review: Annihilator, "Set The World On Fire"

Annihilator were never a band that appealed to my well-grounded melodic ears, up until now that is. Set The World On Fire is fresh and invigorating, lyrically compelling, and musically interesting, although still retaining a disconcerting thrash ideology.

Guitarist and production guru Jeff Waters has taken the Annihilator vehicle on to the 'mainstream' highway and given them direction. The angst-ridden verbosity of Snake In The Grass spits of lyrical frustration, while the uplifting strains of Phoenix Rising and Sounds Good To Me are tunefully tinged to the point of sounding AOR.

Annihilator touch on both sides of the coin that gives STWOF a sound edge that cuts above anything they've done before. Mr Waters & Co. have created a little monster of an album that sets the fuse for something more explosive.

Grade B+

Mark Crampton
Riff Raff
July, 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!