Monthly Archives: July 2013

SKULL192

Posted on by
Reply

BROCAS HELM, Blood Machine / Skullfucker (1999, self-released)

The skull:
This skull faces to his right and oozes a blood-like gel (the Hasbro Blood Machine?). Quite miraculously, this gel congeals to form the word “Skullfucker” below him. It’s probably supposed to look bad-ass, but really looks more like a skull dripping red cake frosting from his lower jaw. Let’s get him a spot on America’s Got Talent.

The music:
The not-very-prolific Brocas Helm offered this two-song single in 1999, and while some prior recordings held some impressive moments, these two songs don’t number among their strongest material. They’ve got a manic momentum with some weird vocals and prominent bass playing, and the overall performances are excellent, as is the Brocas Helm standard. They certainly have a sound like no other — at least until The Lord Weird Slough Feg came along and co-opted their approach. “Skullfucker” is the better of the two songs, but ultimately these are two forgettable tunes, which is too bad, because this band can do better than this and usually does.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL191

Posted on by
Reply

SUBMISSION, Failure to Perfection (2010, Listenable)

The skull:
Brown and mustard. Not off to a good start. The rayed background is lame, too. The skull, which is shamefully obscured by a very boring logo, is flanked by a couple guns, and then some dog skulls or something? And then there’s a big screw. This is about as random as it gets, but it’s also a pretty good representation of the title, which itself fails to even form a syntactical sentence fragment. What we have here is a total commitment to half-assing it.

The music:
Groovy melodic death metal, kind of like recent Dark Tranquillity, with fairly awful growls and a smattering of reasonably good clean vocals. Submission aren’t doing anything new, but they work this style admirably well, with some really cool guitar riffs to keep things moving. The drums, while proficiently played, offer no surprises, and there are too many core-style breakdowns for my liking, but overall, Submission are alright. I doubt I’ll go out and buy their disc, but at least listening to it for this review wasn’t painful. Anymore, that’s about as good as it gets here at Skull HQ.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL190

Posted on by
Reply

SPEED KILL HATE, Acts Of Insanity (2004, Listenable)

The skull:
Originally released by the band with a non-skull cover, this album was quickly picked up by Listenable and graced with a skull. But hold off on the rejoicing, because this is one stock, boring, lame-ass skull cover. Where have we seen this before? Everywhere! Crossbones, flames, Iron Cross, appropriately dumb skull…all of it revealing that, no, Speed Kill Hate had no decent ideas whatsoever for a cover concept and went with this exercise in generic numbskullery. Acts Of Inanity, more like…

The music:
A band featuring members of Overkill, M.O.D. and Bronx Casket Company isn’t anything that’s gonna get this particular Friar all that psyched. When this debut came out, I avoided it entirely — nine years later I’m finally listening to it as per my duties here at Big Dumb Skulls. It’s exactly how I thought it would sound: grooving, aggressive post-thrash that is only for fans of those late ’90s/early 2000s Overkill albums, the most Pantera-esque Annihilator material, and Pantera themselves. Metal for the gullible and easily entertained. At any rate, it ain’t for me. Neither is that album cover. A failure all around, to these ears and eyes.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL189

Posted on by
1

NOX, Blood, Bones and Ritual Death (2010, Listenable)

The skull:
You start with a skull and crossbones, and you think, “This is cool, but it kinda looks like we play pirate metal.” So, okay, add a ritual circle or something. It’s not a pentagram, but it at least sort of suggests magick or some Crowley shit. Maybe add some esoteric symbols, like that thing on all those King Diamond albums. Looks good! But then, you start thinking, “This is pretty plain, just a skull and a circle. Maybe some clouds or something to fill in the background?” Except now your cover is mostly white and grey. That shit ain’t evil. Maybe if the whole thing was red? Bingo! Now that’s a fucking cover you can take to the bank!

The music:
When this EP started playing, I was initially a little excited by the slinky weird riff that opens the disc. But then Nox repeated that single riff for a minute and a half, and called that a track. So, that’s how it’s going to be, Nox? After that momentary illusion of interest, the EP settles into competent Morbid Angel/Nile worship, with hints of black metal thrown in for good measure. Some of the guitar work is genuinely interesting, including the generally excellent leads, and across the board the playing is solid, but an over-reliance on blast beats and the pedestrian growling drag the whole thing down. I think if Nox spent a little more time trying to write the best songs possible, worrying less about sounding and looking evil, they might come up with some properly great work. That said, the band is on hold while the guitarist pursues another project, so there’s no guessing if this is the last we’ll hear from Nox.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL188

Posted on by
Reply

BARSHASKETH, Defying the Bonds of Cosmic Thraldom  (2010, Wolfsvuur Records)

The skull:
Standard issue occult-skull stuff, something we’ve seen a few times already: a plain and lonely skull encricled in a ring of occult writing and symbols. White on black. But look closer and the scrawl is actually the wordy title written in an Arabic kind of script. Their logo? The usual black metal band name font. As black metal-looking as it gets without the use of pentagrams and upside-down crosses.

The music:
I don’t defy the bonds of cosmic thralldom often, but when I do, I listen to Barshasketh. This is some pretty okay stuff, nothing amazing, but it presses enough of the right buttons if you like older, rawer, cavernous, crazy-ass sounding black metal. The playing is generally good and the arrangements fairly ambitious. The guitarist struggles with fluidity in the acoustic guitar section of “Illuminated by Shadow,” but they get flying pretty good when they stick to electric guitar, bass and drums. The final section of “Whisper of Abyssal Winds” is a highlight of this 44-minute presentation. Once I got into Deathspell Omega via Kenose and Si Monumentum…, I worked my way back in hopes that their more straight-forward black metal material was interesting, but it wasn’t. This recording by New Zealand’s Barshasketh is more what I was hoping for in that quest. It’s generally pretty insane, otherworldly-sounding stuff. Of the thousands of bands in this mold, Barshasketh are one of the rare ones putting forth something in the traditional mold that’s actually worth some time. It succeeds because it doesn’t draw from just the classic Norwegian style, or the cult Greek style, or American black metal, it instead fuses a bunch of shades and elements of the genre into its own semi-unique take. Bleakness and darkness intended, bleakness and darkness achieved. These guys are okay by me, although Split Enz remains my favorite New Zealand band by a long shot.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL187

Posted on by
1

EARTHRIDE, Something Wicked (2010, Earth Brain)

The skull:
Surrounded by flowers, bugs, and branches, a ghostly skull with enormous eyes blends into the grass. Maybe the skull is the grass. Woah. Think about it, man. I mean, like, really think about it. You know?

The music:
Fuzzed-out bellbottom doom, like Obsessed meets Electric Wizard, but worse. The singing is terrible, and the guitar tone approaches “all-time-worst.” You can practically hear the mustaches, too. Every now and then they land on a chord progression with some genuine mystery, but the execution and sound are so rotten that those few fleeting moments of inspiration are squandered in a haze of Sunn amplification and poorly doubled vocals. If I never hear another album like this, it’ll be too soon, but I bet it’ll happen in less than two weeks anyway.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL186

Posted on by
Reply

CHTON, Chtonian Lifecode (2004, Retribute)

The skull:
An arty sort of thing here, the skull looking down in apparent despair. We can only speculate where the blood is coming from. Crowns of thorns are popular in metal imagery, so maybe he’s looking down to find the crown of thorns that just fell off his head…but then he’d need some flesh for the crown to produce some bleeding and he’s just a damn skull made of nothin’ but bone so…who can really know? This cover has that confusing thing going on where the album title is flown large at top, making it look like the band’s name is Chtonian Lifecode and the album title is Chton, but no, it’s the other way around. Silly buggers.

The music:
You don’t hear music like this out of Norway very often: death metal apparently influenced by Suffocation and Rottrevore, the kind of tractor-pull noise that I admit a certain fondness for. But you better throw a twist into it, otherwise you’ll be in the shadow of the originators. And while Chton offer an extremely heavy sound that harkens to those acts, they also deliver the occasional wash of dissonant guitar chords and various modernisms, like chunkier chords and rhythms, and a slightly slicker production. So they’re not entirely stuck in the world of early ’90s death metal, but they do use that as a base for their particularly dark, heavy and brutal compositions. I admire what they’re doing here — especially the ungodly heavy bottom end and the Autopsy-like grit — and am curious to check out their second album, which was finally released eight years after this debut. If it’s just a little more interesting than this, then they’re not getting the attention they deserve in this current wave of fondness for old-school death metal. As for Chtonian Lifecode, it slipped by without much impact in 2004, but it’s worth checking out if you’re in the mood for death metal with one foot in the present and another in the good old days.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL185

Posted on by
Reply

D.S.M., D.S.M. (2013, self-released)

The skull:
I’m not sure what’s going on here. The skull’s skin is peeling away, maybe? And some tentacles are involved? Or maybe it’s some kind of cape or cowl with its own little skull motif? It’s all very confusing, but the overall effect is not unpleasing: the batshit weirdness works in this cover’s favor. Supposedly D.S.M. stands for Double Size Metal, but I think that probably DSM is just how you write BDS in Cyrillic.

The music:
There are many musical ideas presented here, but none of them good. There’s some almost nu-sounding low groove, traces of Darkseed-style goth metal, and even some decidedly Nirvanaesque whining in the first song, “The Way Home”. This three song demo run the gamut of all the low-talent metal styles that no one really wanted to hear in 2000, and this is a brand new release. “Balls of Steel” even features the gratuitous abuse of a whammy pedal. Heavy metal in Putin’s Russia is a grim thing.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL184

Posted on by
Reply

EGZEKUTHOR, Hateful Subconsciousness  (1990, demo)

The skull:
From top to bottom this artwork is fun. Try and figure out the logo and what their name means (a play on “executor”? Eggs + executive + Thor?) then work down. Is the skull separating itself from the logo, or crashing into it? Either way he’s got menace in his eyes and looks ready to kill his paintball competition. But he appears to be cracking, and the three paintball splats seem to have caused some of this grief. And he’s got to avoid the fire that burns below (there are a LOT of skull covers depicting fire burning below a skull). What this has to do with having a hateful subconscious is hard to tell, but that would be difficult to convey in a drawing, so the artist did the best he could.

The music:
With the muddy, blurry, echoey recording job, the awesomely named Egzekuthor manages to lend some atmosphere to their fairly standard compositions. This five song, 25-minute demo achieves something a bit above the norm in its class, although it’s yet another “in one ear, out the other” sort of effort. The music itself isn’t bad — there are enough tempo shifts and performance skill to chew on — it’s just that their enthusiasm is greater than their songwriting ability. Their core approach attempts to take what the Big Three of German Thrash Metal did in the ’80s and inject a bit more complexity without going fully “tech,” but not enough highlights emerge from the noisy din screaming “replay me!” In fact, there isn’t a single moment on this demo that does that. So…marvel at the cover and their crazy name and enjoy it for what it is: a barely consequential blip on the radar of Polish metal history.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL183

Posted on by
3

THRALL, Away from the Haunts of Man (2010, Total Holocaust)

The skull:
As an entry in the increasingly crowded “skull full of snakes” subgenre of Big Dumb Skulls, this Thrall cover is one of the finer specimens, although I really do think these bands and artists have a funny idea of skull physiognomy. I guess they think that the eye sockets open into the interior of the skull with no diminution of diameter, but in fact it’s a rather small hole in the back of the sockets. Just big enough for the optic nerve, actually. Not many long snakes would be able to squeeze through a tiny opening like that. But, this Thrall skull is fairly busted-up, and the snake(s) fairly skinny, so I suppose we could generously assume there are some fissures in the backs of the sockets as well, although anything that would cause that kind of cracking is probably just going to break the skull into pieces. Also, I find it unlikely that any snake, just in the course of day-to-day wriggling, would ever literally tie itself into a knot (see the lower right). What I’m saying is, I find some elements of this heavy metal album cover to be far-fetched.

The music:
One man black metal from Australia. At least it’s not from France, I guess. I’m reminded a little of American bands like Weakling and Woe, but as I’ve said many times before, my black metal knowledge is incomplete. I’ve heard worse, and I’ve heard better than Thrall. I will say that the vocals, or at least the way they’re recorded and mixed, are especially annoying here. I think it’s possible that Tom Void (the aforementioned one man) sang through a cardboard tube into his webcam mic or something. Kvlt.
— Friar Johnsen