Monthly Archives: November 2013

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PARAXISM, Paraxism  (1992, demo)

The skull:
With this skull, Paraxism have allowed us to confidently draw a new subset branch on the Skull Cover Motif tree. And this guy, he isn’t too happy about this fate. He looks downright traumatized. This is one of a handful of skulls now officially “Embedded in Rock Wall [popular skull cover motif no. 36].” Nile is one of the memorable ones (Skull75) and we’ve got a couple more coming up soon! So for those rabid Big Dumb Skulls fans who particularly love skulls embedded in rock walls, hang onto the edge of your seats.

The music:
Forever underrated and overlooked, Paraxism is probably one of the most interesting bands to come from Finland’s early ’90s death metal wave. And, as many of their countrymen would, the band evolved from cruel brutality to something more rocking by the end of their evolution (a la Xysma, Disgrace and Convulse), all of these bands wisely avoiding sounding too obviously “death ‘n’ roll.” Thank fuck. While Paraxism’s synth-heavy 1995 demo (Selected Works) remains the apex of their output, and their final recording, a demo from 1998, is nearly unlistenable in its angular, dissonant, and cold alt-rock delivery, this first demo finds the band treading more orthodox boards. It’s not totally far away from most other Finnish death metal bands of the time, but there’s something inherently catchy and even semi-melodic in tunes like “Benefical Interdependence” and “The Breath of Plague” that sets it apart. Ultimately this is more than a mere curiosity from a band I’ve always championed (to mostly deaf ears, except for a couple guys in Agalloch who I turned onto this band a long time ago). But it’s not mandatory either, unless you’re a Finnophile looking for another cool tape to set next to your Funebre, Pakeni and  Nekro-Torso cassettes. All two of you.
— Friar Wagner

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VARG, Wolfskult (2011, NoiseArt)

The skull:
“Wolfskult” is German for “wolf skullet” and you can see here a majestic specimen of this incredibly rare coif. Typically, the wolves emerge from the back of a balding man’s head but here they are attached to a literal skull, for added authenticity. The wolves are being blown up somewhat by a black wind, I assume, as they would ordinarily hang down in the back. This somewhat spoils the effect of the “Austrian passport” as the doo is sometimes called, but I will admit that it does make for a striking composition. The skull, as you can imagine, is most pleased with his snarling wolvenlocks, and is probably off to pick up chicks. What woman could say no?

The music:
I was expecting black metal, that being the typical style of bands named after wolves (especially in Swedish), but actually this is some kind of pagan death metal. Unlike, say, Ensiferum, however, Varg are actually a death metal band, and not some trumped-up power metal band with a growler. I’m reminded more of turn-of-the-century Hypocrisy than anything else, with maybe a hint of Amon Amarth in the cheesier moments. There are no nasal clean vocals attempting to summon the spirit of the meadhall; there are no flutes or bagpipes, no folk. And unlike Turisas, Varg does not wear comical barbarian furs. But, exactly like Turisas, they paint their bodies in red and black stripes (and no doubt causing Glenn Tipton to wonder why he didn’t think of it.) I’m not about to research this, but I assume there’s some quasi-historical theme at work here, a la Braveheart, although really, it’s a stupid practice no matter the provenance. I generally find the whole “pagan” scene to be ridiculous and lame, but Varg are at least better than most of their pipe-tooting, horn-hoisting, jig-dancing cohort, and if painting yourself like a circus tent and paling around with Eluveitie is what you have to do to make a buck in this business, well, there are worse ways to debase yourself — you could always play in Trollfest.
— Friar Johnsen

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AGABUS, Mitakuye (2008, self-released)

The skull:
Though there are about 75 Photoshop layers on display here, the entire cover basically boils down to a Big Dumb Skull and some feathers. At least, those are the elements that catch my eye. It’s not clear how one relates to the other, but considering the origins of the title as half of the Lakotan phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin,” probably some cliched Native American theme was intended. In any case, the core idea is so lacking that it’s easy to see why the artist decided to just pile on with the other shit, like the glowing spots (with lens flare!) for eyes, the streaky background that looks like the cover of a speculative book on string theory, a phases of the moon calendar, etc. It’s not clear why he stopped where he did, but this was made in 2008, so maybe his Mac was just running out of memory.

The music:
If we take it as axiomatic that “crossover” was (roughly speaking) a hybrid of thrash metal and hardcore punk circa 1987, then Agabus can be viewed as “crossover ’08”, a horrible Frankenstein of late aughts thrash and millennial hardcore that perversely selects the worst elements of each style for inclusion: go-nowhere riffs, threadbare breakdowns, and vocals like the hoarse, cracking shrieks of an adult throwing a tantrum. About the best that can be said for Agabus is that their album sounds pretty good, and it’s novel to hear toughguy sprechgesang in Italian, instead of Spanish (Ill Niño, I’m looking at you, but there are no shortage of West Coast metalcore bands who employ the device.) Especially infuriating is the sheer length of most of these songs, which all sound like shorter songs played twice in a row. But hey, at least they trimmed the titles down: while their debut was littered with such turgid gems as “Void, Predicant of Nothing,” Mitakuye‘s titles are all single words like “Numby” and “Fiux.” So at least they’ve got that going on.
— Friar Johnsen

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NUNSLAUGHTER, SathaSlaughter (2009, Universal Tongue)

The skull:
This poor guy’s eye is falling out, which is really not that surprising because he’s grotesquely deformed and nothing seems to fit together right. But, you’d think the other eye would be the first to go, considering how small it is compared to its socket. And while I know the thing surrounding the skull is probably supposed to be a cowl, it looks an awful lot to me like Jaws from the movie poster, so I imagine this guy thinking, “Aw shit! My eye just fell out! How could this day get any worse?” right before the Great White bites him in half.

The music:
Nunslaughter play time-capsule death metal, sounding perpetually like a Morbid Angel demo from 1987. Rude and crude death metal about how Jesus is a square. They’re the masters of the cult-of-limited-edition, releasing dozens on dozens on dozens of incredibly limited cassettes, 7″s, splits, EPs, live albums, etc. Someone once told me that the main Nunslaughter dude worked at a music repro plant, which is how he could afford to do all that shit. Probably they have more Big Dumb Skull covers, but we don’t have the patience to look for a better one than this, and this one is more than good enough. I don’t know how a person gets hooked on Nunslaughter in the first place, but once it happens, that person is in for a world of frustrating collection. Personally, I find their music to be unimaginative and dull, but for the style, it’s perfectly fine. If you want caveman death metal, they’re as good as anything, I suppose. This EP starts with a bunch of covers (all of them curated for maximum underground cred, of course, and including a version of “Jaws of Satan” by Sathanas, whose demo was, coincidentally, SKULL211) before wrapping up with a few songs they probably recorded seven or eight times elsewhere, like for some Romanian Tour EP limited to 27 cassettes. Somewhere out there is some insane superfan with every one of this band’s intentionally obscure releases, and that person must have the worst taste/judgment ever. I’d kind of like to meet him. How could he not be fascinating, on an anthropological level? And I wonder how long you could pronounce the band like “Nun’s Laughter” before he lost his shit?
— Friar Johnsen

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LEPER, Laz (1992, demo)

The skull:
An angry skull with fangs, beady eyes and a biomechanical mane of horns and spikes and pipes, this skull isn’t much to look at, but he has a serious attitude. He’s probably furious that someone drew an “L” on his forehead while he was passed out. “You assholes! That’s permanent marker! I don’t care how wasted I was, this isn’t fucking funny. I have a big interview with the Voivod tomorrow and if I can’t get this washed off by then, I’m seriously gonna kill you guys. I don’t even LIKE Leper!”

The music:
I haven’t heard Laz. Seemingly no one has. There are no YouTube videos, no mp3s on Russian metal forums, no torrents, nothing. As far as I can tell, there are exactly two references to this demo on the entire internet. One is the entry on Metal Archives, from which we cribbed this fine skull. The second, bizarrely, is an Amazon listing. A single seller lists a sealed copy of Laz (complete with price sticker residue), and although the artwork is different, the tracklist agrees with the one on Metal Archives. On the original full scan of the skull-fronted cover which can be seen on Metal Archives, a note on the second panel of the J-card reads, “For full color sleeve send $1.00 check or money order made payable to Rick Bettencourt. This sleeve must accompany payment.” The color cover shown on Amazon is so singularly uninteresting that anyone who might have entered into that transaction with Mr. Bettencourt surely wound up disappointed and angry, and might perhaps have sent the color cover back, requesting a refund of the dollar and a return of the original, skull-emblazoned insert. Given that this cassette is sealed, though, it’s possible that there existed a pressing which never included the skull cover, deepening the mystery and no doubt enhancing the collectability of the skully original. And now, dear reader, let me attempt to illustrate the insanity that occasionally grips this friar, by saying that I briefly had that $16.45 cassette (plus $3.99 shipping) in my Amazon shopping cart, such is my zeal to bring you the most accurate information possible about even the obscurest Big Dumb Skull. In the end, or at least for the moment, common sense prevailed, and I removed the cassette from my cart. Common sense, that is, and the fear that expedited shipping would be required to make deadline, as we at Skull HQ don’t shuffle skulls once they’re set in their order. Leper’s Laz, in its full-color, skulless, high-bias glory, remains for sale on Amazon, waiting to be bought, the last earthly proof that this “Heavy Metal” band from New Bedford, MA ever existed. Perhaps it is a lost classic, a demo of unrivaled excellence, a release that could have changed the direction of metal forever. Perhaps it is shitty funk thrash. I would love to know, but even I have my limits. Those limits evidently amount to $20.44.
— Friar Johnsen

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BLOODRIDE, Crowned in Hell (2011, Violent Journey)

The skull:
Fuck it. Why even bother making it look like the candlestick exists in the same space as the floor and the skull. It’s pasted in there, isn’t that enough? So what if it looks like it’s floating. That’s black magic or something! And what kind of lighting could possibly illuminate a scene in this fashion? The raw ingredients of this Photoshop nightmare are of a far higher caliber than what you normally see, and the hack that assembled it has a certain measure of skill with the software, but basically no attention has been paid here to the most obvious details that would make the image look realistic. The designer was so pleased with himself at having given the skull horns in the shadow that he basically whiffed every other aspect of the piece. “Check out the awesome shadow illusion on this gnarly skull, dudes! It’s like, even in death he’s totally fucking evil. Also, I added some nails, a candlestick, cobwebs, bloodstains, two textures of wood, and your shiny logo. Pay up!” And then Bloodride handed over a six pack of whatever’s the Finnish equivalent of Old Milwaukee. Paid in full.

The music:
It used to be, in the long ago, that metalheads grew out of thrash and into death metal, but these days, you’re as likely to see that evolution in reverse. Before this recent thrash revival, it was totally possible to skip thrash as a developmental stage altogether, excepting an obligatory exposure to Metallica and Slayer. The sound of thrash that’s been reverse-engineered by death metal kids after they hear Bonded by Blood the first time is a very specific, and generally unappealing thing. Witness Bloodride, who surely, as young men, grew up on Children of Bodom and In Flames and Napalm Death before they heard of the Bay Area and had to apply the lessons of their Eurodeath heroes to the creation of thrash. The result is unnecessarily heavy and insufficiently buoyant, wanting desperately to sound evil and forgetting entirely to sound pissed. The music is plodding and the vocals uncharismatic. As with all Finnish bands, Bloodride are perfectly capable on their instruments, and their album sounds impeccably fine, but there’s no energy and none of the manic, careening, thrilling vitality that animates the best thrash bands. Or even the lesser, but still good revivalists. If you’re too young to remember when Rob Flynn wore cornrows, then maybe this passes as thrash, but to me, it’s just half-assed junk.
— Friar Johnsen

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LUCTUS/ARGHARUS, Sonitus Caeli Ardentis (2007, Ledo Takas)

The skull:
I think the title is Latin for, “The brown skull in the sky is ours.” Or something like that. The forecast is “cloudy with a 100% chance of skull.” The weird mismatched textures are either the result of inept Photoshoppery, or a concept a little higher than I’m willing to investigate right now. Maybe the skull is etched into the moon, which is crashing into the Earth and causing extreme weather. This is just too much for me to think about right now. I need to lie down.

The music:
Luctus are Marduky black metal. Argharus are a little more modern sounding, with a kind of industrial precision, but still fairly generic. And slower. Both bands are Lituanian and neither are particularly interesting, but it would take basically the best shit ever to interest me here. I really just don’t have a great tolerance for bandwagon black metal, so if a band isn’t going full-tilt avant-garde in their service to Satan, I’m just not their target audience. But hey, maybe you have a few dozen black and white albums with songs about war and snow and satan, and you’re thinking about branching out into browns and sepias. If so, well, this is definitely your jam. Get on it.
— Friar Johnsen

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TARTHARIA, Abstract Nation (2004, Crash)

The skull:
This looks like maybe some kind of ancient brooch or decorative bit of metalwork, but after it’s been placed in a grave and crushed by a few thousand years of dirt. The photo the band found of this artifact also looks fairly old, as if someone in the band ripped it out of a history book in high school and had it folded up in his back pocket for a couple years, just waiting for the moment he could use it for his important debut album.

The music:
I dunno, there’s something about that logo that just screams, “Inoffensive death/black metal with some melodic vocals and bad groove parts.” It could also easily signal that the band is “pagan” somehow, with all the pipes and accordions that implies, but thankfully that seems not to be the case. Tartharia are the sort of band that might say, “Our influences are Pantera and Dimmu Borgir” and expect you to nod in agreement and say, “Sounds brutal.” They’re not an awful band, just dull. Also, they’re Russian. That alone is usually sufficient reason to steer clear, unless you have really good intel to the contrary. This album can be had for literally pennies on Amazon, though, so if you’re in the mood for a bargain, well, I guess you could do worse.
— Friar Johnsen

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ORODRUIN, Epicurean Mass (2003, Psychedoomelic)

The skull:
Though they originally issued the album with a terrible blue mirrored image on the cover, Orodruin wisely decided to retool with a Big Dumb Skull for the 2009 digipack reissue. This cover is also shitty and blue with a mirrored image, but at least there’s a skull dropped nonsensically on top. Epicureanism is often conflated with hedonism, or at the very least with gourmandism, but the teachings of Epicurus stressed moderation and self-control. Epicurus himself was vegetarian. His was also a materialist philosophy that rejected the supernatural and divine, so the very idea of an Epicurean Mass is a bit oxymoronic. But, having failed to do their research, Orodruin cooked up a fantasy of a gluttonous rite that ends in death for the participants, a kind of Masque of the Fat Death. Maybe they should have made the skull chubbier, then.

The music:
Sludgy doom with an epic feel, heavily indebted to Sabbath without being a slavish copy. Think: Gates of Slumber and Reverend Bizarre, although Orodruin work the trippy 70s vibe a bit more heavily than either of those bands, and incorporate less traditional 80s metal into their sound. I’m also reminded in places of Krux, although Mike Puleo is no Mats Levin. While I find this sort of music rather dull, I’m not about to say Orodruin are a bad band. If they were a little less fuzzy, a little less sloppy, and if their songs and singing were a little better, they’d almost be as good as early While Heaven Wept, which is more my kind of doom. This is also the band’s first album, and although it’s ten years old, it’s still their only full length release. I guess for some guys, it takes a long time to write a slow song, and with as much time as they’ve had to work on their follow-up, maybe the next one will be awesome.
— Friar Johnsen

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THE EVERSCATHED, …Again the Chains… (2006, demo)

The skull:
This skull thought he knew the layout of his basement well enough to just float over to reset the circuit breaker in the dark, but then he got all snagged up in the chain web he forgot he was working on last week. “Oh, god damn it. Honey! HONEY! Can you grab a flashlight and come down here and help me out? No, no, I’m alright, I just… Can you just give me a hand? And watch where you’re going, it’s a real mess down here. I really gotta clean this place up. God damn it! And can you bring me a band aid or something? Now I’ve got to go get a fucking tetanus shot. This is just great.”

The music:
The instant the first track, “Shackled by Failure” starts, you know that these dudes love Death. But while most Death clones shoot for the melodic complexity of albums like Human and Symbolic, The Everscathed took the low-ambition route of following in the footsteps of Spiritual Healing, and only half of it at that, as they generally stick to the low-string and power chord riffs in Chuck’s transitional playbook and skip the high melodic lines that define the later Death albums. Both of the songs on this demo are pretty much the same in that regard. As Death knockoffs go, even considering the narrowness of their scope, The Everscathed aren’t bad, but you also quickly realize exactly how important all those tapped melodies and harmonic lines were to Death’s creative success (not to mention an ace rhythm section, which The Everscathed definitely do not have.) Without those trebly excursions, you’re left with a lot of samey-sounding riffs that aren’t nearly as evil or heavy as I think The Everscathed want them to be. As far as I can tell, all of the full length albums by the band follow more or less the same pattern, so I guess if you kinda like mid-period Death but think they were just too noodly, then maybe this is the band of your dreams.
— Friar Johnsen