Monthly Archives: May 2013

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VOMITOR, Bleeding the Priest (2002, Metal Blood Music)

The skull:
Although it’s probably supposed to look like it was photocopied (or Xeroxed, as we’d have said in 1986) a dozen times to remove any nuance of shading, this is surely just some skull scanned from a book (or another demo!), with the colors reduced to two in Photoshop. As with all things, it’s way easier to be cult in this day and age than it used to be.

The music:
Possessed meets Bathory. Sloppy as shit, derivative as fuck, pointless as hell. I’m sure you can already hear it in your head: buzzy guitars, tinny drums, reverberated vocals. There isn’t a single original idea or riff on this entire album, although first half of “Reaper’s Carrion” is pretty cool, before it turns into some terrible Obsessed By Cruelty outtake. This is so stupidly oldschool that this 2002 release was reissued on cassette in 2013. I look forward to the flexi box set packed in a Trapper Keeper that’s set to be released in 2016. Based on all the surface details, I assumed Vomitor were Brazilian, but the internet assures me they’re Australian, which really just makes them the poor man’s Slaughter Lord, nearly 20 years late. A dubious distinction, that.
— Friar Johnsen

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VANEXA, 1979-1980  (2010, Jolly Roger Records)

The skull:
When you have an obscure band unearthing boring music from decades ago with a totally lame album title, what can you do but pair it with a simple skull cover? That’s what Vanexa did. Props to them for at least coming up with a skull that is uniquely their own, a bit more stylized than we normally see and certainly not trying to keep it real by depicting like a genuine human skull. The Vanexa skull (wonder if they called him Van? Van X-A?) hovers in the middle of a simple geometrical pattern of two squares and a circle. Cool, dude.

The music:
What are the chances I would get served two consecutive skull-laden albums compiling the early works of junky traditional heavy metal bands from Italy? This skull-digging is some dirty business sometimes. Vanexa have been around since 1979, and even though their last album, the fourth, came out in 1995, they’re apparently still together. You can see from the title that this album collects their earliest material in demo and live form. It’s mostly forgettable hard rock/heavy metal that’s typical of the day, in terms of style (ie. NWOBHM-sounding stuff) but lacking any noteworthy invention or vision. Horrible yelping vocals don’t help. Something like “Hiroshima” can be cited as proto-speed metal in the same way early Raven and Accept can, I suppose, but these guys ain’t Raven or Accept. Pass!

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GOATWHORE, Carving Out the Eyes of God (2009, Metal Blade)

The skull:
A bleak black and white skull with some occult symbol scrawled in the forehead, probably from the corny Simon Necronomicon published in the early 80s (see also: Morbid Angel). The skull is flanked by two scythes, which I can’t imagine are the ideal tools for eye-carving, but underneath the skull are two of those ridiculous “combat knives” you’re likely to find at that cutlery store in the mall that also sells Klingon weaponry. I guess you could those to carve out the eyes of God, even if a straight blade is almost certainly a better choice. The skull obviously has no eyes, so maybe it’s supposed to be God’s skull, but if it is, eye carving is probably the least of this skully God’s problems. He’s got no skin, and Cthulhu is on his case!

The music:
I’ve never been able to get into Goatwhore, but since most of my time not enjoying them is spent actually seeing them live (they open for a lot of bands I like), I usually forget that their albums are really not so bad. They’re just not my thing. Goatwhore are basically a stew of Slayer, Deicide, and Celtic Frost: mid-to-fast paced thrashy death metal with a swaggering groove. Their earlier albums feature a pretty strong black metal influence, but that’s less evident on this, their third full length. But from album to album, and then song to song, there’s very little variation and almost no genuine creativity, and the entire enterprise feels too calculatedly engineered to interest angry adolescents in nail-studded bracers. Slayer’s been working that beat for years, and even they can’t turn that mission into good music, so what chance does a band from New Orleans have?
— Friar Johnsen

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ANGUISH FORCE, RRR 1988-1997  (2009, My Graveyard Productions)

The skull:
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:  give us something we can use!!! This is about as basic as it gets, and we’ve seen it many times: white skull ‘n’ crossbones on a black background. But that’s the business we’re in here at BDS, and if it gets too fancy the Council gets cranky, so we’ll take it! Notable is the sinister grin and leering eyes looking downward at the clunky album title. This skull looks like he’s up to absolutely no good. Please note that if you’re going to use the word “Force” in your band name, it seems ridiculous to the outside world to have the word “force” in such a small font. Not very forceful.

The music:
I can only find evidence of this Italian band releasing material since 1998, and in those early days as Anguish (they added the tiny “Force” later). But if they’re telling us they’ve been around since 1988, I guess we have to believe them. The stuff all sounds very modern in production, so I’m guessing some of these songs were conceived by one of the guys back when we was 13 years old and they finally recorded them once they had a few official albums under their belt. No idea why this collection’s title is preceded by “RRR.” Nevertheless, there are 12 songs here, including Uriah Heep and Grave Digger covers (“Sympathy” and “Heavy Metal Breakdown,” respectively, although you could probably guess that Uriah Heep never wrote a song called “Heavy Metal Breakdown”). Their originals are pedestrian speed/power metal, in the vein of, but less than the German bands who popularized this approach — you can hear Helloween in here, and even a more obscure band like Attack. It’s okay, very well-played, just not conceived by visionaries or anything. As with many Italian metal bands, the vocals suffer due to a strong and not particularly attractive accent. And, yet again, we have an example of the album cover reflecting the band’s own musical laziness. With titles like “Fire From Hell,” “Death in Hell,” “Priest of War,” “The Witch of the Castle” and “Heroes of Metal,” you probably won’t be surprised to know that much of their material is interchangeable. Stock, stocky and stockiest riffs galore. You have to appreciate the longevity, though, whether they got their start in 1995 or way back in 1988. (You know, Voivod put out Dimension Hatross in 1988, which is apropos of nothing, I just wanted to write about a great band on this site for a second…)
— Friar Wagner

 

 

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CANNAE, Troubleshooting Death (2000, East Coast Empire)

The skull:
Staring at a screengrab of this weirdly glowing skull, filthy with gravegrime, a weary Hyderabadi tech support agent asks, “Have you tried rebooting it? Is the skull plugged in?” He’s never quite understood the job of troubleshooting death, nor is he even comfortable asking who is ultimately paying him, but the wages are good. “Maybe these thorns are the issue. Were they there when the problems started?” He’s going off script, which rarely makes anyone happy, but he doesn’t know what else to say. “That stuff in the background is probably blood,” he muses. “Maybe when the flesh was removed…” he begins, when the caller curses at him and hangs up. He doesn’t care. He’s paid by the call, and the queue is deep.

The music:
Typical deathcore crap, a mix of the worst Obituary riffs and desultory breakdown chugs. There’s not much to say about this kind of music, so I’ll take this opportunity to appreciate the editorial decision of Metal Archives (the Council’s second favorite internet destination) to deny this entire style a place in its hallowed halls. For as much as I hate this stuff, I’d say it’s undeniably metal, and while all deathcore is completely awful, the same can be said of pornogrind, which is heartily welcomed in the Archives. One imagines that the embargo is not based on the music, but on the haircuts, or maybe the logos. Who knows, but it’s just another reason Metal Archives rules, even if it sometimes makes our jobs here at Skull HQ a little harder.
— Friar Johnsen

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NODE, In the End Everything is a Gag  (2010, Scarlet)

The skull:
Got the whole Rorschach test artwork approach going on…kind of. You can spot tiny variations, but ultimately it’s yet another skull cover that plants a skull in the middle of the frame and chucks a mess of formless junk at it, plasters it around the skull and calls it good. Is it really good? I guess it’s better than many we see here at BDS HQ. We sure would like to see the skull a lot bigger though…any skull smaller usually gets stuffed into the Honorable Mentions closet and forgotten about. But man, look at all that junk! That skull ain’t gettin’ outta there any time soon. What it all has to do with the album title I have absolutely no idea…

The music:
For as long as this Italian band has been around, it sure seems like no one has cared very much. Constantly under the radar, their music is of a consistently high quality, in terms of performance, but do they deliver something special, something to treasure and revisit year after year? Not really. Albums and songs have their moments throughout their discography, but it never feels essential and never draws you back for repeated listens. This album, their fifth, is their least remarkable yet, ruined by vocals that are the epitome of modern metalcore screaming — interchangeable with the hundreds of other bands that sound like this. So fucking vanilla. Think Anselmo-meets-Lindberg…yep, that thing. Musically, nearly every song has a cool riff, an unexpected rhythmic shift, or a comes-out-of-nowhere spiraling melodic guitar line or theme (“Masks of Life”), but as a whole it’s forgettable stuff. The Billy Idol cover (“Rebel Yell”) is lame, although you gotta give them credit for trying. Ultimately, they’re heading down the metalcore road and that’s a mistake. They’re too experienced to be jumping on bandwagons, and they’ve chosen the worst bandwagon to jump on. Node? Nope.
— Friar Wagner

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DEATHALIZER, It Dwells Within (2009, self released)

The skull:
This skull is pissed! Pissed about holistic healing or something, I guess, because he’s chomping the shit out of those crystals. He don’t give a fuck about his chakra. Lord knows what those things above his head are. Really badly knicked scythes? Bullwhips with terribly unergonomic grips? Only the skull knows, and I’m not going to be the one to ask him. I don’t want to be deathalized!

The music:
With all the new retro thrash bands out there, it’s easy to forget that even throughout the 00s, thrash never died entirely. Sweden more or less carried the torch all those years, but there were some American bands, too, who loved that old bay area shit even when everyone else was getting moist over post-post-post-whatever. The main creative difference between those wayward thrash acts of the aughts and the snotty atavists of today’s new scene is that the thrash bands in the age of George W Bush acknowledged and even celebrated the influence of Pantera. And so we come to New York’s Deathalizer, whose sole release is this full length mash-up of late 80s Metallica and Pantera, with a dash of pre-cornrow Machine Head. You’d expect something like this to suck horribly, but surprisingly, it does not. This isn’t life-affirmingly excellent stuff, but it’s riffy and catchy, with reasonably good Hetfieldian vocals and even some interesting harmonized cleans. I wish the guitars harmonized a little more often, or mixed up textures within riffs, but this is a pretty common shortcoming of modern thrash acts. Considering that this is the band’s debut recording, and the band is still together, I’d say there’s a good chance that their next album will start to approach actual excellence, so keep an eye out for these guys.
— Friar Johnsen

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SKULLTORCH, demo (2007)

The skull:
It would seem this skull is floating in a forest in autumn, with leaves actively falling across his brow. And he looks pretty pissed off about the situation. Very simple black and white, with a totally generic logo at the top. The skull is not even mounted on top of a torch or anything. Maybe he’s on a quest for the torch, roaming through dense endless forests, and when he finds it in the castle the reunion will be glorious and many elves and dwarves will come together to celebrate the completeness of skulltorch and all will be joyous in the kingdom.But it’s probably just another ill-conceived album cover from a band that lacks a bit of vision.

The music:
This Belgian band haven’t followed up this utterly forgettable four-song demo yet, so we’re going on six years there. Not surprising, as they really had nothing important to say in the first place. It doesn’t get much more boring than this: Pantera-influenced groove metal punctuated with the kind of mid-paced death metal Unleashed were doing around the time of the Warrior album or what Gorefest started doing on False and Soul Survivor. But see, that makes Skulltorch sound almost good, and they’re not. While the drummer is clearly talented, the two-chord chug riffs and even some of the vocal patterns are not that far from nu-metal level inanity. I’ll take a pass and hope that someday one of these modern metal bands with a skull cover on their demo will be totally amazing.
— Friar Wagner

 

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CANNIBAL CORPSE, The Wretched Spawn (2004, Metal Blade)

The skull:
This is just the censored version of the cover, which crops out a trio of zombie doctors presiding over a fairly implausible double caesarian/natural delivery. The skull in question is just a detail of the decor in their abominable operating theater, or something. It kind of looks like bone, but it would make more sense if it was just a carved detail in a larger wooden piece. The skull is splattered with blood, despite being what looks to be a fair distance from the table, so I guess you know that a lot of really nasty shit goes down here. Or whatever. Man, it’s hurting my head trying to impose narrative on a Cannibal Corpse album cover.

The music:
I’ve hated Cannibal Corpse for a long time. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t hated any metal band so vehemently for so long. I bought their first album, on cassette, shortly after I had discovered Carcass. I went back to the same shop and said, “Give me something like Symphonies of Sickness!” and that asshole sold me Eaten Back to Life. Now, I will grant that Cannibal Corpse have improved over the years, and some of their post-Chris Barnes albums almost sort of approach listenable, but in truth, even the best of them are fairly bad. It’s the same fucking shit, over and over, with the same inane lyrics belted out with the same charmless growl, and some of the most boring death metal drumming ever. I do understand the appeal of this band to angry, awkward teenagers who want to piss off their parents (it is eternally offensive after all), but I can’t for the life of me understand how an adult (who isn’t a sociopath) could find anything to like in Cannibal Corpse. Nostalgia for their awkward and angry adolescence? Who knows. Some day, arthritis of the neck will permanently disable Alex Webster and Corpsegrinder, and when that happens, here’s hoping the former retires to a quiet senescence making Blotted Science albums with Ron Jarzombek, and the latter leaves the scene forever to get fat in front of his monitors, playing the 17th iteration of World of Warcraft.
— Friar Johnsen

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BOARDERS, Rust of 99  (1999, self-released)

The skull:
This poor thing. Bleached white and lonely, with an elongated cranium that’s getting into John Merrick territory. He looks sad and worried. But his teeth are in great shape. Another of those last-minute, totally uncreative skull covers that seems to have absolutely no purpose other than filling up space.

The music:
Boarders also doubles as a Megadeth tribute band and they probably do okay with that in their Italian homeland. Their original material is along the lines of Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction and Youthanasia, the clean, streamlined stuff, but this covers EP shows a slightly rawer Boarders (are they skateboarders?). You get covers of Helloween, Megadeth, Metallica (a cool choice of “Escape”), AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Testament songs. Competently performed with no big surprises, although the vocals are uniformly terrible. Oh, and there’s a drum solo tacked onto the end. You’ll do without this one just fine.
— Friar Wagner