SKULL334

Posted on November 30, 2013 by Friar Wagner

TOTENBURG, Endzeit (2009, Nebelfee Klangwerke)

The skull:
A warming, homey sort of design as you might see adorning a panel of an antique porcelain stove. Gramma Rosenstein has one of these stoves, and she makes the most delightful challah. That’s a cute little bow tieing up the crossbones too. C’mon gramma, fire it up and…oh wait…Totenburg sing about what? And they’re German? Oops. Sorry, gramma. Not funny.

The music:
These guys play black metal delivered with a militaristic mid-paced churn, and when they take it above 100 mph, they do it with great ability, all clanging ride cymbals and mad blizzards of trebly guitar. They’re pretty okay at what they’re doing, but lose me totally with their NS/white power bullshit. Luckily the lyrics are in German, so if you aren’t too PC about this sort of thing, and you like Endstille and Marduk and need yet more average-but-adequate black metal in your musical diet, you would probably find some enjoyment in their brand of hateful noise. They’ve been doing it since 1998 and, quite likely because they are, politically, a bunch of assholes, nobody’s really taking much notice as of yet.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL333

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

THE KILLING MACHINE, Fellow’s Wait (2005, demo)

The skull:
This looks like some super-generic horror movie poster. Or actually, like some super-generic direct-to-DVD horror movie cover. You can practically see the small serifed font underneath that says something like, “Evil bursts through.” The big skull actually has a little skull nestled into his forehead, like the beginning of a nasty skull fractal, but because the size differential is so great, and because the little guy is clearly of a piece with the big guy, we’ll treat it as an adornment and not a second skull for the purposes of Skullection qualification. But yeah, it looks like the skull is emerging from a satin bedsheet or something, which I guess would be kind of scary. But what the hell does “Fellow’s Wait” mean? Does it, and the image (with the sheets), imply some supernatural sexual menace? As in, “This fellow’s wait for some action has been so long, he’s a skull now, and he’s not gonna wait anymore!” That must be the plot of the movie: this skull flying around the haunted house some nubile young lady has just inherited, making kissy noises and chasing the sisters of the heroine’s sorority, who though this would be an awesome location for their Halloween mixer with the dudes from Kappa Tau. Damn. I need to call my agent. This is gold!

The music:
The Killing Machine began as an Iron Maiden and Judas Priest cover band, and this, their lone demo, bears those influences out. Sadly, they sound more like late 90s Maiden and Priest than I think anyone would prefer, but they’re not a terrible band. Just a little dull. They even have a song called “We Bore,” which is the saddest mission statement I can imagine. There is some life and even some originality in “The Mansion” but mostly, this is metal that fails to excite. The singer is adequate, with a reasonably wide range, but his voice has a weird pinched tone, as if he forgot his allergy medicine. The demo is produced a bit oddly, but there’s something very natural about it that I find appealing. The band is “on hold,” supposedly, but with only this one demo to their name, I think it’s probably safe to say this is the last we’ll hear of The Killing Machine, but if they do reactivate, hopefully the intervening ten years will have imparted the wisdom and taste to take this music in the direction it needs to go.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL332

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Friar Wagner

METALLICA, Harvester of Sorrow (1988, Vertigo)

The skull:
Although he would become one of the most copied rock culture artists ever, the wanna-bes have yet to dilute the greatness of Pushead in his prime. One of the most frequent tools in Pus’s kit was bone; bones ripped from all over the skeleton. Here we have but one skull, qualifying it for inclusion in the Skullection. It’s a fine one too. In the hands of a lesser talent, this could have looked pretty stupid, a fist punching through the top of a skull, holding scales (scales of justice, apparently). The skull looks absolutely wrecked from this probably quite painful ordeal. And there are bandages too. Pushead loved bandage as much as he loved bone. It’s not clear if it’s the arm or skull’s neck that’s bandaged, maybe both, but it kinda looks like neither. I’m thinking the skull is resting on a bandaged tree stump. Yeah, shit gets pretty surreal in Pushead-world. And who knows from where the hand originates? Best not to question these things. I’ll bet it was the record label’s decision to lay this image over the crinkled black stuff in the background. Probably pissed Pushead off at time, but then again, record labels have done much, much worse to desecrate an artist’s version. An A- then.

The music:
Little band outta L.A./San Fran here, never quite got the recognition they deserved. Sound sorta like Gaskin. This 12″ single from 1988 features one of the least interesting songs from that same year’s …And Justice for All, although even the worst on this album is listenable, serviceable, clinical thrash, or in this song’s case, half-thrash. This is one of those Metallica songs that buckles down at half speed and attempts something throbbing, or at least, with its infamous “implied bass” production, let’s say “heavy” instead of throbbing. And it achieves that aim, succeeding as a solid example of where the guys’ heads where at in 1988 and where they would go next. And with Metallica, the good and the bad, you always get a ton of personality from each player. I’ll always stand up for Lars Ulrich’s drumming. He’s not a technical mastermind, but he’s got what many clinicians lack: style and character. His approach is a huge ingredient for what makes Metallica Metallica. People who say they wish Metallica had a better drummer are nuts; it would no longer be Metallica. James Hetfield delivers some of his best lyrics with a menacing sneer, and the solo is one of Kirk Hammett’s most direct, sounding like it was lifted from the Kill ‘Em All sessions. He lays off the wah pedal for once, delivering a short and sweet passage that’s more thematic than solo-y. Favorite moment: James snarling “infanticiiiide.” Elsewhere on the EP, Metallica prove my opinion that they are the best cover band of all time. About 95% of the songs they choose to cover end up sounding absolutely fresh in their re-molded state (one of the best but least known is their bold reinterpretation of Iron Maiden’s “Remember Tomorrow”). The b-side of this slab contains two killer covers: the systematic rape of and power infusion given to Budgie’s “Breadfan” and a totally majestic treatment of Diamond Head’s “The Prince.” So lookie here, an addition to the Skullection boasting a truly killer skull on the cover and equally high-quality music inside. A rare convergence! (Incidentally, I believe Friar Johnsen will be saying the same thing of Overkill’s The Years of Decay, skull328, which comes before this one, but which I have not read yet.) The Council are getting drunk on mead, guzzled out of mugs made of human skulls, of course…these are high times for Big Dumb Skulls!
— Frair Wagner

SKULL331

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

OBSZÖN GESCHÖPF, Day of Suffering (2000, demo)

The skull:
There are plenty of logo-chomping skulls out there, and this one at first glance appears no different from any other, but look close and you’ll notice that the bottom jaw is scaled completely differently from the rest of the skull. It’s got mismatched dentition, too. I have to assume that either the top or the bottom was different at one point, probably the top, but after the artist scaled it back from whatever idiotic monster he originally drew, he forgot to similarly update the bottom half, leaving us with the chimeric skull we see here. That’s exactly the kind of inattention to detail that can elevate a Big Dumb Skull from the ordinary to the sublime, and while I won’t say that this cover has been so elevated, I must nevertheless applaud its dauntless stupidity.

The music:
This is simplistic and fairly boring electronic industrial music on to which boxy, heavy guitars have been grafted. The guitar parts can hardly be called riffs, as they are mostly single-chord chugs to go along with the bloopy keyboards and do little aesthetic work beyond signifying that Obszön Geschöpf are metal in some way. There are some guitar solos as well, but these are hilariously bad. They’re played poorly per se, but they are comically out of place amid the bargain basement techno thumps and square wave burps. Obszön Geschöpf are basically a one-man band, but hillariously it’s a French guy trying to toughen up his image with a German band name (and he even got that wrong, failing to properly decline the adjective; the name translates to “Obscene Creature.”) I’ve written about industrial metal before, and I’ve gone on record saying that it’s fairly hard to do the style well, but this demo is never in any danger of crossing the fine line between stupid and clever.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL330

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

PITIFUL REIGN, Toxic Choke (2006, self-released)

The skull:
Drawing your album cover with a pencil: that’s oldschool. Adorning it with a grinning, deformed, and dripping mascot skull: that’s going all the way. But if the skull isn’t named Pete Evil (get it?), I’d say that at a minimum, an opportunity was missed. In any case, I appreciate the DIY charm on display here, and the ridiculous skull is exactly the right kind of ridiculous.

The music:
I feel like every time I have to review British thrash, old or new, I end up insulting it by comparing it to Cerebral Fix, so I won’t do that this time. And anyway, Pitiful Reign don’t really sound like them, but they do sound very British, in the worst way, even if the bass tone is 100% Souls at Black, all rubbery and bad. Musically, this would probably fall in the middle of the rethrash quality spectrum, but the production is so bad that it’s hard to appreciate at face value. The vocals, clearly recorded without a pop screen, are clipped so badly that I wonder if the mic used was the one built into the singer’s laptop or phone. The entire mix is punishingly loud and in very short order listening to Pitiful Reign becomes quite taxing on the ears. Coming out as it did in 2006, this album was at least a little bit ahead of the rethrash trend, but it’ sadly no better than anything that’s come out since.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL329

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Friar Wagner

VIO-LENCE, Nothing to Gain (1993, Bleeding Hearts)

The skull:
This album was eventually reissued later with a mushroom cloud on the cover, but c’mon, that’s such an overused image! Now a skull, there’s something you don’t see every day. Here, a skull is superimposed over the Earth. Rad! Along with skulls sporting horns/antlers, skulls embedded in rock walls, and the ol’ skull ‘n’ crossbones, skulls in/on Earth are now an official Big Dumb Skulls Subset. (See the Arbitrater skull, Skull232). Apparently this album title is a pessimistic comment on the human plight, telling us there’s nothing to gain; that for all our progress, all our fighting, bickering and money-making, there’s nothing to gain, that death will greet us all, rendering everything we do pointless. Including creating album covers with skulls on them and writing a blog about album covers with skulls on them. Oh, the humanity…

The music:
This album was recorded in 1990 but didn’t find release until thrash reached its commercial nadir in 1993. But even in 1990, despite featuring all five members from the prior two Violence (or Vio-lence) albums, the band took a turn toward groove and slower tempos, a la Forbidden’s Green or Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. Those two albums don’t matter much to me, and I don’t like Nothing to Gain very much either. The energy and mania of their first two are in rare supply here, capped by the uncharacteristically mundane delivery of vocalist Sean Killian. If you’ve heard the earlier albums, you’ll no doubt agree that Killian was anything but mundane. (They band were killer live, too. Saw them twice on the first album tour and will never forget either show.) Sure, they were aligning with the zeitgest of 1990 with this more corralled/controlled sort of sound, and they weren’t the only Cali-thrash band to work at slower paces come the 1990s, but this is not a great album by any stretch. It’s not entirely worthless either. Perry Strickland is a killer drummer, proven by some seriously bad-ass syncopation in “Twelve Gauge Justice.” This song most resembles the band’s older, faster material, and comes after opener “Atrocity,” a dull crawler of a track. “Atrocity” is inconceivably bland, a difficult thing to sit through at a seemingly eternal 5:02. It’s arguably worse than the worst moments from Overkill’s I Hear Black or Testament’s The Ritual. You get where this album is going, right? On the plus side, Nothing to Gain features some cool mid-tempo rifferamas, insane whammy-excessive guitar solos, and Strickland’s terrific drumming. But even at its best, there’s something flawed in the production, all cheap and clunky sounding. A punchier, tighter sound would have been more appropriate for the groove that infests this album, although I’m not actually endorsing that sort of jump-metal nonsense. (It’s no surprise where Robb Flynn would go, “artistically,” after exiting Vio-lence.) And let’s go back to Killian, who sounds normal throughout much of the album. Killian? “Normal?” WTF? But I dunno, I’ve lost a few degrees of enthusiasm for this band over the years. As much as I like the first two albums, the gang vocals seem less attractive as time goes on, so even those I have to go into all prepared, fully in the mood for some ripped-jeans ‘n’ white-high-tops thrash. That mood happens occasionally too, but more often I’ll travel south of heaven for Dark Angel or Kreator…so there’s very little chance I’d ever be more in the mood for Nothing to Gain over Eternal Nightmare or Oppressing the Masses. Yes, what we have here is just another sub-par but not-entirely-crappy post-thrash album from those confusing 1990s.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL328

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

OVERKILL, The Years of Decay (1989, Atlantic)

The skull:
Although Overkill has a number of Big Dumb Skull covers (all of them depicting their mascot, Charlie), this one is obviously the finest for a number of reasons. First, the skull is bigger than any of the others (excepting, maybe, Bloodletting, which wouldn’t really qualify as a proper BDS anyway). Second, the wings are de-emphasized (here they’re depicted as windows, but if you didn’t know to expect a bat-winged skull on every Overkill album, you probably wouldn’t even make the connection). Third, the Council and we Friars have a soft spot for architectural skulls. And finally, this cover just fucking rules, and if you can’t see that, you’re some kind of idiot.

The music:
While I have met perfectly reasonable metalheads with otherwise defensible tastes who don’t care for this album, I secretly believe all those people are mentally deficient and possibly criminal. The Years of Decay, for me, is a foundational thrash album, a unique and almost perfect gem, a desert island disc. I love basically everything about this record: the production (dark and dry), the guitar tone (the ultimate expression of the ADA MP-1), the playing (Sid Falck’s drumming is a highlight, and Bobby Gustafson’s solos are absolutely unhinged), and of course the songs and lyrics. The riffing is insanely great (just the intro to “Elimination” is worth a million bucks) and Bobby Blitz’s lyrics are peerlessly pissed off, while still featuring some of the cleverest, funniest turns of phrase ever delivered. I can’t think of any lyrics in the entire corpus of heavy metal that are so believably angry, and Blitz’s career-peak delivery, manic and melodic, perfectly captures that feeling we all have sometimes, asking, “How can the world fucking be this way?” From the explosive buildup of “Time to Kill” to the shreiking blackout that ends the album (with the song “E.vil N.ever D.ies,” the conclusion to the four song “Overkill” song cycle started on the band’s debut), there’s almost nothing to complain about here. Almost. The plodding dirge of “Skullkrusher” goes on way too long (although the frantic middle section largely makes up for this), and the title track is perhaps a bit too mopey for its own good, but while these songs have their individual shortcomings, they nevertheless work perfectly in the context of the full album. This is a thrash album that sounds like nothing that came before and nothing that’s come since, a classic for the ages, and anyone who disagrees with me can go fuck themselves until they come to their senses!
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL327

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

GAMMADION, The Fuse is Lit (2005, Strong Survive)

The skull:
Remember all those cool Dave McKean photocollage covers from the 90s, with random neat shit in antique boxes? You know, like the Disincarnate album or the first My Dying Bride full length? Well, this is kind of like that, but with just a single box, and crappy. And also not a collage. The best part is obviously the blocky skull pillow, though. I never thought about the needs of sleepy skulls before, but this cover has really brought the issue to my attention. It’s no wonder so many of the skulls we see look so cranky. Evidently they have to rest their heads on stepstools. I’d be a mess, too, if that was how I had to sleep.

The music:
Nazi true metal from Poland. Musically, it’s not terrible, kind of in the same vein as Atlantean Kodex, minus the doomy parts. Occasionally they drop into a blast beat, but it always feels out of place, as if they know that they’re putting on airs. The Polish-language speak-singing is pretty bad, though, and of course the lyrics are presumably about white supremacy and the master race and whatnot. “Gammadion” is the Greek work for “swastika,” so you know they’ve gone all-in on the NS bullshit. If the lyrics were about something a little less ridiculous, like unicorns or muscle cars, I would be tempted to say that maybe Gammadion are on to something, but I’m not about to endorse the work of racist thugs.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL326

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

PENTAGRAM (CHILE), Demo #2 (1987, demo)

The skull:
A grisly subject, this skull is cracked and bloodied no doubt from being run through a photocopier a couple dozen times, the hard way. He’s managed to keep his shit together, but only barely, and you can see in his gritted smile that he can’t put up with too much more of this. A skull has his limits!

The music:
Pentagram are minor legends based on, really, just a couple of demos from the mid 80s. They played thrash bordering on death metal that you could place somewhere between Kreator and Possessed, and while they never do anything especially original, they were certainly among the first bands in Chile to be playing this sort of thing, and it can’t be denied that they do it well. On this second demo, they even somehow approximate the fabled Sunlight Studios guitar tone a year before Nihilist’s first demo, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those Swedish lads took direct inspiration from their South American contemporaries. You can’t come to Pentagram looking for sophistication or technicality, but if you have a fondness for this sort of raw proto-death metal, then you should certainly check them out. Both demos from 1987 were released on CD a few years ago, although I believe that compilation is itself out of print and hard to come by, but the band is back together with a new album, and I imagine it’s just a matter of time before their classic material is available again.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL325

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

MINECREEP, The London Sessions (2008, demo)

The skull:
I think the logo and the skull were some kind of papercraft art project. Like, the bassist sat hunched over a table with a piece of construction paper and a pair of safety scissors for the entire weekend while the other guys got high and made fun of him, but when he opened that folded piece of paper and revealed a logo and a skull cut neatly out of the middle, they changed their tune right quick. Of course, it would have been better if he hadn’t used light blue paper, so in the end they had to scan it for their demo. And since they were already in the computer, they pasted the silhouette over some orangey-brown background, because deep in their hearts they understood that skulls like earthtones best.

The music:
You wouldn’t think groove metal, Therapy?, and mid-90s Megadeth would work together, and you’d be right, but listening to Minecreep, you might occasionally think that maybe there could be a chance you were wrong. This is a clunky demo with bad singing and an unenviable set of influences, but Minecreep almost make it work, sometimes, because although it’s pretty easy to hear where a lot of these ideas came from, they’re sufficiently warped to end up sounding at least somewhat new. Then again, there are moments of pure groove metal hell, and on top of it all, the miserable yelping vocals, so it’s not like this ever really rises above, but when they band locks in on a cool riff, it suggests at least some possibility. But they’ve had 5 years to make something of that, and so far, this remains the sole offering of Minecreep, so I’m not gonna hold my breath
— Friar Johnsen