SKULL120

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Friar Wagner

JOE THRASHER, Metal Forces (2009, self-released)

The skull:
Love it. Just endearingly dumb, this silly skull grins madly under a dorky logo. The black and red simplicity makes it look like some NWOBHM 7 inch. Very much looks like the skull of famous DC comics villain the Joker, if he were to be de-fleshed…particularly the ’50s/’60s era one, if we’re being really nerdy.

The music:
Plus points for naming this album after the great UK metal magazine of yore. Onslaught had their “Metal Forces” song decades ago, but Joe Thrasher probably doesn’t know that, or maybe they just don’t care. What do we have here? We have a group of Canadians hellbent on playing the strictest interpretation of ’80s thrash possible. They’ve studied up on their countrymen, as lots of this album reminds of Canuck thrashers like Razor and Piledriver. The playing is fine, the riffing and solos are vice-tight, so it does the requisite thrash thing there. The vocals are a not-very-vicious snarl that’s like Vince Neil trying to do thrash, or Steve Souza trying to do Vince Neil. At just under 27 minutes, these nine songs blaze by without much to distinguish one from the other. They all thrash like hell, though every now and then they churn along in a mid-paced bore (“The March”). “The March” is worse than the worst Manowar (and I like Manowar, for the most part). The lyrics are dumb as fuck. This would have gone mostly unnoticed on an old label like Mean Machine or New Renaissance back in the day, so it sure as shit doesn’t measure up now.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL119

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Friar Wagner

ENTOMBED, Stranger Aeons (1992, Earache)

The skull:
Under one of the best metal logos of all-time, an encircled skull and crossbones sits humbly, demanding your attention. It’s simple and effective enough, the gray/black negative-image style treatment working well in conveying starkness and darkness. But I don’t know, it’s still kinda stock. This design was seen first on the band’s Clandestine album, featured on the cover of this EP, and also was spotted on the Wolverine Blues album. They also used it on a later self-titled collection, so they really tried to get as much mileage out of it as possible. Look real close and you’ll even see it on the Hollowman EP somewhere.

The music:
On the heels of the Clandestine album, this 3-song EP was released to keep it going…not that it was ever in danger of stopping. That album, and their first, remain at the top of all-time death metal album lists 20+ years later. So, the label pulled “Stranger Aeons” off Clandestine, and it’s a great choice. At a short-ish 3:26, the song finds the band’s signature ultra-fat guitar sound delivering killer riff after killer riff, not least of which is the main one: a lumbering, crushing, grooved monster that recalls Dark Angel’s “No One Answers.” Great riffs, great tones, great leads, and just okay vocals by Nicke Andersson. Speaking of whom, he and guitarist Uffe Cederlund snuck into the studio in late 1991 and recorded two songs that didn’t make the album, “Dusk” and “Shreds of Flesh,” and those are both here. These songs are even shorter than the main track, 2:42 and 2:04, and they’re good, but they suffer a little bit in sounding samey to what we’ve already heard from the band. No surprise that they changed direction after this, snipping off the fat a la Carcass’ Heartwork and changing direction in an effort to stay fresh. Fuck yeah, early ’90s Entombed! You can’t beat it.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL118

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

W.A.S.P., Best of the Best (2000, Snapper)

The skull:
While I guess it took a little while to clip together the background collage of old W.A.S.P. albums and royalty-free saw blades, the final product here is still a triumph of laziness and grim boredom. The enormous skull seems to have no greater raison d’être than to provide a whitish background so the logo stands out better, but if nothing else, it would be difficult to fit more skull on this cover. Of course, plopping a translucent skull over a red background means most of your cover will be pink, but hey, we don’t judge here.

The music:
While W.A.S.P. has released about three dozen greatest hits compilations, the definitive, nay quintessential W.A.S.P. best-of is their self-titled debut, which contains about 85% of all the good songs they ever recorded, a fact obviously not lost on the hard working folks at Snapper Records, who saw fit to dedicate a full third of the tracklist on Best of the Best to songs from that album or the band’s debut single. Bear in mind that W.A.S.P. had released eight albums by the time this compilation was issued, two of which are entirely unrepresented here. But while you won’t be hearing any songs from Still Not Black Enough or Kill Fuck Die on Best of the Best, you’ll get two tracks from Helldorado, the band’s worst album (as of 2000), including the flabbergasting “Dirty Balls.” And really, if “9.5.-N.A.S.T.Y.” is to be counted among the best of the best, I shudder to imagine what even the worst of the best would be. Die-hard W.A.S.P. fans will of course want this for the two exclusive songs, including the all-time second best heavy metal cover of Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” The best never sounded so bad.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL117

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

BAJEN DEATH CULT, Bajen-a-voo-doo (2004, Tifo)

The skull:
A leering skull, silhouetted in green, and wearing a bone necklace or something. He looks quite smug, actually, which is not too surprising, considering he’s just some asshole Swedish hooligan (although surely there’s a more appropriate Swedish term of art). We apologize for the shitty low-res scan of the cover, but physical copies are only available at the stadium, and the people who already own this keep it behind glass in their personal shrines.

The music:
People in the United States often take sports WAY too seriously, but there is really nothing in American sport that compares to the insanity of European football superfandom. Take for instance Bajen Death Cult, a band formed by members of Grave, Unleashed, Grand Magus, and Necrophobic in order to sing songs about their local team, Hammerby IF. Grown men, in other words, writing, rehearsing, and recording songs about soccer. This is not an isolated incident, either. All metalheads should know by now that “Up the Irons” is a rallying cry not so much for Iron Maiden, but for West Ham United. Years before their first album, Vanden Plas released a single in tribute to 1. FC Kaiserslautern. Bobby Schotowski (Crows, Sodom) and Waldemar Sorychta (Despair, Grip Inc., producer of every good LP on Century Media ever) formed Dortmunder Jungs to celebrate BVB-Meisterfeier. You see the pattern here. These people are all crazy. They choose their cars based on the availability of their team’s colors. They name their children after players from the 70s. They see a phrase like “Central Attacking Defensive Center Back” and nod in sage understanding. Getting back to Bajen Death Cult and their EP, this is basically raucous Hellacopters-style metal punk, with a ballad thrown in for good measure. The lyrics are all in Swedish and are about saves and slide tackles and penalty shots and handsome Nordic men taking dives and punching one another in the groin when the refs aren’t looking. I assume. Naturally, there is no reason for anyone to seek this out, lest they live in whatever tiny part of Sweden that pledges allegiance to this particular team. Go sports!
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL116

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Friar Wagner

EYEHATEGOD, Southern Discomfort (2000, Century Media)

The skull:
Surrounded in a square of thorns sits the Eyehategod non-logo and a skull looking bleakly off to the left. The smudge on its forehead is like some weird Ash Wednesday rite, and it’s a simple black and white. Nothing going on here, really…about as much thought went into the album cover as the music inside.

The music:
I liked Eyehategod for about two minutes in the early ’90s. Their take on doom was novel, and you know the take I’m talking about: rancid, crusty, bluesy, sick…but after you peel away the veneer of vomit and blood you face an endless procession of generic sound-alike riffs and bullshit vocals that just add insult to injury. And maybe that’s the whole idea. Depravity and emptiness. Southern Discomfort collects various stuff from between 1993 and 1996 — split tracks, single tracks, demos. Go for it if you just can’t get enough Buzzov*en or whatever. I’ll stick to Saint Vitus and continue to have a grudging respect for the unlikely legacy these guys have created over the years.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL115

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

IMMENSE DECAY, From Ashes Till Remains (2011, self-released)

The skull:
The Council sees a lot of covers like this, which frame a central, large skull with some vague, abstract textures. It’s as if the band asked for just a big dumb skull, dead center, for their cover, but then saw the first draft and were beset with a nagging doubt in their creative vision. So, they sent the artist back to fill in the empty areas, and maybe could he work in a little color? It looks like this image is supposed to suggest carven stone, but I doubt any sculptor, ancient or modern, would spend the time needed to chisel the brain folds or coils of intestines that adorn the space around this otherwise handsome skull. Who knows, though. Maybe Immense Decay had it planned out all along. “Picture it: a skull in a gutpile, slathered in stucco! It’s literally gritty!” Seriously, picture it, that’d be pretty cool.

The music:
As you’d expect from a band called Immense Decay (if you’re not already singing “Angel of Death” to yourself, you’re not much of a metalhead!), this is pure Slayer worship. The production is modern, but the riffs are straight out of the King/Hannemann playbook. That said, even some random band from Poland can put out a better Slayer album than Slayer in this day and age, and if you don’t need originality in your thrash (and really, at this point, how could you?), From Ashes Till Remains might tickle your fancy. The band is tight, the songs are decent, and the vocals are acceptable. Plus, you can impress your thrash friends with the obscurity of your taste and the reach of your acquisitiveness. That alone is worth something, right?
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL114

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Friar Wagner

MARTIRIO, Decadencia (2009, demo)

The skull:
Ooooh, spooky. This skull would look utterly terrifying if it weren’t for the random baby crying for mama in the lower right portion of the artwork. Huh? Also, note the ghostly growth of a skull coming out the skull’s upper left cheek. Again I say, “Huh?” But those fangs are sharp and ready to rip. The foggy haze adds some atmosphere to this frightening/silly scene, and if that skull’s goin’ down, he’s gonna mangle a few baby heads doing it. Apparently.

The music:
If I didn’t have a band picture for reference, I’d say these guys were the sort of modern death/thrash band that takes influence from fourth generation bands like Carnal Forge. You know, Xerox copies of Xerox copies of Xerox copies until the original root is lost. It just has that stock sort of sound to it. It’s very capable stuff, musically, and the vocalist is strong if utterly interchangeable with hundreds of similar others who bark in that Anselmo-meets-Cavalera sorta way. But see, the guys are wearing Metallica and Slayer shirts, so I guess they do have a deeper understanding of thrash’s history than it sounds. Still, there’s really no reason you should seek out Martirio’s seven song demo since there’s so much more easily accessible stuff around that delivers exactly the same sort of thing. Unless you cannot get enough Carnal Forge or something.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL113

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

KOZELJNIK, Wrecked in Ruins of Solitude (2007, Spiritual WarArt Productions)

The skull:
A shitty low-contrast photo of a skull, washed out in a murk of very dark aquamarine. Is this skull’s solitude ruinous? It’s hard to say. He looks a little wrecked, maybe, but I think that’s more on the hands of the designer than on the solitude. Big, dumb, and ugly.

The music:
Here at Skull HQ, Friar Wagner and I generally tackle skulls on an even/odd basis. We occasionally mix it up, but generally we’re at the mercy of a skull’s divisibility by two. By pure coincidence, most of the primitive/raw/underground black metal has landed in Friar Wagner’s queue, which has worked out well considering his greater familiarity with black metal. But, with skull113, my number is up, and I’m forced to confront a release that’s pretty far outside my wheelhouse. My interest in black metal tends toward the progressive and well produced. Darkthrone enthusiasts need not knock on the door of Friar Johnsen. So, when confronted with this sort of Eastern European, tr00, kvlt, black-as-in-darkness-and-evil kind of stuff, I’m somewhat at a loss. Listening to Kozeljnik, about all I can tell you is that they sound like a lot of other bands. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell you which bands they are. This isn’t even bad stuff (well, two of the four tracks are rehearsal recordings, and one of those is a cover, and those are at a minimum unnecessary), but fuck if I can say more than that. This isn’t Darkthrone-style primitivism — there are a lot of riffs and some interesting ones at that — but there also aren’t any surprising elements on offer. The production is buzzy and raw but not confrontationally no-fi, and while the playing is rough around the edges, it’s not amateur-level sloppy. To me, this is like hundreds of other ill-defined black metal bands, and since Wrecked… came out in 2007, it’s virtually guaranteed that none of the ideas hereby presented are even remotely original. So if you want to learn more about this band from Big Dumb Skulls, you’ll just have to keep your fingers crossed that the band releases another cover with a skull, and that it lands on the even pile. So, maybe check this space in early 2015.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL112

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Friar Wagner

INFERNOISE, Hellriders (2006, self-released)

The skull:
Swear we’ve seen this picture, this very same skull before. It probably comes up near the top if you type “skull” and “images” into Google. It’s missing a few teeth and looks bored hovering there in the black, circled in yellow and thinking “this release is so obscure, no way am I going to be discovered running around with this low-rent crew.” But then he didn’t count on us skull-hunters at BDS. This is big, this is dumb…and lotsa yellow too!

The music:
This short-lived Spanish band were produced by Stratovarius guitarist Timo Tolkki at one point. The music on this mercifully short three-song EP sounds like the tossed off junk from Pantera’s final album. Or any post-Power Metal Pantera, really. Infernoise, then, is groove metal with thrash elements that has absolutely no reason to exist. The vocalist really, really wants to be Phil Anselmo too. About as much creativity went into this music as the cover idea. C’mon, people, give us something we can use here!
— Friar Wagner

SKULL111

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

THE ORDER, Son of Armageddon (2006, Dockyard 1)

The skull:
Stark, but not bleak, this skull looks like the logo for a comic book from Dark Horse or Vertigo: some kind of crime story with a horror twist. It’s hard to tell because of the lack of shading, so maybe this skull is just pictured from a high angle, but I prefer to think he’s just got a very tall brainpan. The band logo is even a little clever: the cutouts in the top of the Rs are silhouettes of guys playing drums and guitar (and not just any guitar: the greatest guitar ever, the Jackson Randy Rhoads Flying V!) It could be that this skull isn’t even human; it looks a bit simian, and perhaps this son of armageggon is a damned dirty ape. But those apes evolved from people (after they blew it up) so the Council is okay with the possibility.

The music:
Crunchy, sorta old fashioned heavy metal that reminds me more than anything of Judas Priest’s Jugulator. To be fair, The Order are not that bad, but they’re based on the same bad idea: namely to take 80s style Priest and update it for the 90s with high gain amps and 40% more attitude. That this was released in the mid 00s makes the offense even more grave. I’m also reminded of some teutonic AOR bands of the past fifteen years that can’t come to grips with the fact that they’re basically making hair metal, no matter how slamming their productions. They turn the distortion up and maybe add a little double bass, but the songs are still stupid ditties about women and rockin’. Again, The Order aren’t quite as cheesy as that, but an awful lot of the riffing is heavy only in the way Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood was heavy. At their best, The Order approach recent Pretty Maids in quality, but without the same bouyant sense of fun. This is the band’s debut, and it appears that their later albums benefit from a bit more levity, even as the music becomes more rocky and less to my taste. And none of those albums feature a big dumb skull, so it really seems that it wasn’t meant to be, for me and The Order.
— Friar Johnsen