SKULL386

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Friar Wagner

SOL ASUNDER, Horribly Human (2007, self-released)

The skull:
Taking a page from the Dave McKean book (at best) and trying to cop the vibe of those early My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost album covers by melding death and nature to make some sort of poetic statement or some shit, this thing is pretty lame. A totally low-rent version of the McKean and Travis Smith sort of deal. I see something that sort of looks like butterfly wings amongst the black smudges, and they went all-out with the pale green flora there.

The music:
If you told me this band was from the US and showed me the album cover and then asked me to guess what kind of music they play, I would have said “Swedish-style melodic death metal.” And that’s kind of what they do, but they have a much heavier approach than your typical band in this vein. Saying that they’re in the In Flames school of SMDM would be like saying Skeletonwitch play Testament-esque thrash. Because, yes, they do, but it’s way, way, way heavier and way more modern, to the point that the root influence is smothered. That’s what’s happening here — it’s almost like Sol Asunder are ushering in a new age of melodic death metal where the influence of Iron Maiden is nil, bands like Maiden and Helloween being considered quaint by these kids who were shitting their Pampers when Whoracle was released. It’s nice that Sol Asunder remember to put the “death” in “melodic death metal” (musically and vocally), and there is definite musical ability here, but they’re not doing enough to stand apart from the minions of melodic death and modern death bands, all of who continue to render each other redundant with their interchangeability and lack of unique traits. These guys were storming along quite nicely as an independent live and recording unit between 2003 and 2009, but seem to have fallen off the map a little bit these last few years. You hardly noticed, right?
— Friar Wagner

SKULL385

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

THE GATES OF SLUMBER, The Wretch (2011, Rise Above)

The skull:
This is just a beautiful cover. An ancient skull, rotting like old wood, shrouded in shadow and cradled in leaves. The blue/green palate is mysterious, almost poisonous, and the simple scene conveys perfectly the sort of eldritch malice I think the band was hoping to evoke. If all skull covers were like this, we’d have to take the “dumb” out of Big Dumb Skulls. Fortunately for us, almost none of them are.

The music:
As regular readers of this site will know, I’m not much of a fan of Sabbath-style doom metal, but that’s exactly what The Gates of Slumber play, and I’m alright with it. I couldn’t tell you why this band is good when all those others are not. Maybe it’s because I saw them a couple times in tiny rooms and they seemed like cool dudes. Maybe it’s because a good friend of mine loves them so much that his affection has rubbed off on me. Maybe it’s because they’re obsessed with Conan and the other classics of swords-and-sorcery pulp fiction. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s their awesome cover art. While The Wretch is their best cover, for obvious reasons, most of their art is spectacular. Anyway, who cares? I don’t have to explain my random shitty taste to you! Suck it. The Wretch is the the band’s full-length (forever – they’ve recently broken up) and it’s their best, although all their albums are more or less the same mix of early Sabbath and slow trad metal. The vocals are the worst part; they’re badly doubled in that typical doom metal way, and Karl Simon’s voice wouldn’t be particularly interesting in the best possible presentation, but I’m somehow able to forgive them, or at least ignore them, long enough to just dig on the riffs and the atmosphere, which is heavy and unpretentious. It’s probably for the best these guys called it quits. They never really changed, and while they always got a little better from album to album, there’s clearly a limit to how far this sort of thing can be taken, and maybe they found it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL384

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Friar Wagner

P.L.F., Pulverizing Lethal Force (2008, Obsessed With Wickedness)

The skull:
Here he is, the Skullmaster General, complete with all-seeing third eye and spike-laden battle helmet! He comes flanked by his rat minions, who will eat anything Skullmaster General does not. The ulna bones (or maybe femur bones) are apparently the remains of a recent meal. At least, that’s what I’m going with. It’s unclear whether they belong to the skull, and they can’t possibly be from the rats. And maybe those rats are actually opossums, judging from their snout. Holy shit, with a scene like this and these sorts of bad-ass characters roaming the nether-regions, anything’s possible!

The music:
17 songs in 20 minutes, woo-hoo! Originally released with a non-skull cover, Obsessed With Wickedness put things to rights and reissued it a year later with this album cover. So, are P.L.F. actually a pulverizing lethal force? They’re definitely pulverizing. “Lethal” is probably open to interpretation, but I’ll give them lethal. This is some incredibly ferocious and energetic death-leaning grindcore. A prerequisite for this sort of thing is total power and, at its very foundations, P.L.F. deliver on “lethal.” A “force” would be like a Napalm Death or even a Nasum, so I’m not sure grind clones like these guys would qualify as a “force.” But that’s really reading way too much into music that’s supposed to be of-the-moment. Here today, gone tomorrow, just like most halfway decent grindcore bands. I’ll admit that P.L.F., while not exactly a force, are just a notch above “halfway decent.” If you dig this stuff, you’ll love it. I’ll stick with Terrorizer and prime-era Napalm Death, because my attention span for this kind of thing is very short beyond the godfathers of the style. Funny little note: Before this album the P.L.F. stood for the apparently ironic Pretty Little Flower. Taking a page out of the Summertime Daisies book, eh guys?
— Friar Wagner

SKULL383

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

HAIL! HORNET, Disperse the Curse (2011, Relapse)

The skull:
This looks like an all-digital ode to Pushead, but that’s not so bad. I guess he’s chomping through a net or something, maybe a beekeepers mask. Does anyone keep hornets like bees? Probably not – why would you? But the more I think of it, the more this kind of looks like some kind of attack on an apiarist, what with the smoke in the background. I guess if you’re on team hornet, you’d probably have some kind of beef with team bee, so maybe that’s it. Send the skull over to fuck that guy’s hives up, show him who the real kings of the Apocrita suborder are. “I’m here to disperse the curse! And by curse, I mean your teeth, motherfucker” Wham!

The music:
I expected full-on Kylesa-style sludgy crap when I queued this up, and given the pedigree of Hail! Hornet’s members (Buzzoven, Weedeater, and Alabama Thunderpussy) I think I was not crazy to do so. But while the vocals are full-on supershitty, the rest of the band are actually alright, sounding kinda like something not-too-popular on Earache Records in 1992. The music splits the difference between English grindcore (the slow parts, ha ha) and Scandinavian death rock. It’s simple, but it’s well done, and the grimy but not fuzzy production is perfectly suited to it. The problem is, the songs don’t have a whole lot going on. They tend to inhabit a fairly narrow range of tempos, and man, that vocalist is really bad. He sounds like some run-down tweaker with pneumonia. I’ll give these guys credit for exceeding my dire expectations, and for easily besting the next best thing any of them has done, but I think they’ll need to improve a bit before I truly care.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL382

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Friar Wagner

ORCHID, Through The Devil’s Doorway (2009, The Church Within)

The skull:
Remember those Madball toys? Those baseball-sized spheres depicting weird-ass faces that looked like rejected Garbage Pail Kids? This Orchid skull looks like the skull of any given Madball. It’s a pretty retro-cosmic image, and those stars make it look like that old Proctor & Gamble logo. A fairly cool piece of art, a spherical skull trapped in psychedelic swirl…ready to sell you abrasive kitchen and bathroom cleanser.

The music:
Amongst the stoner-doom contingent, young San Francisco band Orchid are hugely revered already. And while they’re very good at what they’re doing, what they’re doing — ripping off a particular era of Ozzy-fronted Black Sabbath — is no more or less interesting than Sheavy and Count Raven, who staked their claim on this hallowed ground eons ago. Personally, I don’t need another band like this. Now, Witchcraft, there’s a band…a band that somehow manages to push forward and look ahead while drawing from the same well of inspiration as Orchid. Part of that’s down to songwriting acumen, and part of it is knowing not to cross the fine line where inspiration and plagiarism meet. Let me just go ahead and state the obscenely obvious: Black Sabbath did it better than anybody else. Of course I hear other ’70s and ’80s bands within Orchid’s sound, but just listen to this and tell me it’s not 98% derived from Black Sabbath 1970-1975: “No One Makes a Sound” < “Supernaut” // “Into the Sun” < “Symptom of the Universe” // “Son of Misery” < “Hand of Doom.” What’s the fucking point???
— Friar Wagner

SKULL381

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

ACE OF SPADES, Ace of Spades (1994, demo)

The skull:
The odd angle of the skull and the random floating junk, combined with the green palor, immediately made me think that maybe this is some macabre jello-mold. Just out of frame to the right, there’s probably a chunk of pineapple, or a maraschino cherry. Revenge is a dish best served cold. And lime-flavored.

The music:
Although nominally thrash, Ace of Spades don’t sound obviously like any other thrash band, or really any other band that I can think of. It’s not that they have an original sound, it’s just that they seem to have just mashed together every kind of heavy-but-not-extreme style they came across in the late 80s and early 90s and called it a day. Like, 90s Loudness meets Machine Head, maybe? It’s not really good, but at the same time, it’s sort of refreshing to hear a band that’s not trying to be anything in particular. Just metal. I kinda like the singer, whose throaty, more-or-less melodic vocals kind of mix the best and worst of Japanese vocals. He has an accent, but his warbling delivery is fun nonetheless. The riffing occasionally reminds me of weak Megadeth or Annihilator, or even some reject Black Mark power metal band. I dunno. This is a weird thing. Not great, not even very good, but still weirdly endearing. The band released only this one demo, and it doesn’t appear that any of the members went on to do anything else. It’s a time capsule, this one; that’s for sure.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL380

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Friar Wagner

JUDECCA, Eternal Rest (1992, demo)

The skull:
I don’t see a bell, but they got the book and candle part down. This demo cover is something we’re starting to notice as a fairly frequent occurrence here at BDS, taking some old master’s painting, or a detail of it, and slapping it onto your tape or album, hoping nobody notices. It’s a common Big Dumb Skull cover motif subset; welcome to the club, Judecca! (Other examples: Skull327, Skull265, Skull241) I dig how Judecca’s logo manages to be fat, blocky AND drippy. You don’t see the fat/blocky/drippy combo much.

The music:
Back in the day you couldn’t open your mail without a Judecca flyer falling out. That was mostly in the period when the band was being distributed and released by Wild Rags Records, whose mail flyering was second-to-none. I well remember Judecca’s name from those days, but apparently aggressive flyering doesn’t always work, because I still hadn’t heard them until today. Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find their Eternal Rest demo anywhere, but maybe I didn’t scour the Internet quite hard enough. Really, though, the next year’s demo, 1993’s Scenes of an Obscure Death, can’t be THAT different from Eternal Rest, can it? Listening to Scenes…, and given its affiliation with Wild Rags, I’m not surprised this sounds like it was recorded in a damp basement with cheap knock-off equipment on a boombox. Stylistically it’s somewhere in the area of long-forgotten NYC band Sorrow, has a Six Feet Under sort of simplicity, and a whiff of early Death/Mantas too. It’s marginally interesting in spots, like the charmingly clunky break in “Unspeakable Acts,” its wailing sustained guitar note providing water in an oasis of dull riffs, dull rhythms and standard-issue death vox that are very much the epitome of second rate death metal demo vocals circa 1993. But those little moments are just the reactions of ears desperate for something along the lines of early Asphyx and not getting it (by that I mean Judecca’s component parts seem to promise that sort of sound, yet they never deliver it). The fan in me that loves Nuclear Death, Blasphemy and Hellwitch keeps hoping to uncover some obscure Wild Rags release that I can sit alongside those gems, but it isn’t gonna be Judecca.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL379

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

FALCON, Falcon (2004, Liquid Flames)

The skull:
It’s a skull in a falcon helmet, (made to look) embossed in leather. That’s pretty awesome! The skull, however, is fairly small, and that’s not so awesome. Also, why does it look like there are stink lines coming off the falcon’s wings? I’m certainly prepared to believe that falcons are foul-smelling birds, but I don’t see why it would be necessary to artistically capture this detail in leatherwork. Also, what’s the deal with the large shadow of the helmet in the lower half of the cover? Is it supposed to look like an actual skull in an actual falcon helmet is staring at this leather, casting his shadow thereon? Maybe it’s his reflection? Ultimately, this cover raises more questions than it answers, and I am left feeling perplexed.

The music:
Falcon was formed by former Destiny’s End and Isen-Torr guitarist (and former Metal Maniacs scribe) Perry Greyson with Cirith Ungol guitarist Greg Lindstrom (playing bass here) to make old-fashioned hard rock/metal like, well, Cirith Ungol. Really early Cirith Ungol. And like Cirith Ungol, Falcon are defined primarily by horrifically bad vocals, but unlike Cirith Ungol, there’s no charm to Greyson’s tepid moaning. The music isn’t very interesting either. This sounds like the sort of band you imagine Cirith Ungol having to play shows with on the way up to the massive success they would later achieve. Every riff is a cliche, the pacing is stultifying, and that god damned singing! Basically, if you’re a mustache-and-bellbottoms heavy metal kind of guy, then maybe Falcon could be your thing. For me, this is just lazy, boring, retro junk that exists only to moisten the adult diapers of a certain kind of German. I like a lot of Greyson’s other bands, and he always seemed like a cool dude, but this band just sucks.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL378

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Friar Wagner

VESPER, Possession of Evil Will (2010, Düsterwald Produktionen)

The skull:
Although this design is striking and wholly professional, we really wish this skull were bigger. Lots of wasted space with that whole huge area of black and dark rust red. It’s perhaps the yellowest skull and crossbones we’ve ever seen, and the logo looks like it was done by whoever designed the Usurper logo. But yeah, bigger skull next time, Vesper. You’re on notice!

The music:
With the vaguely Nifelheim-ish look (album cover and the band members themselves), and also with the Agonia-style album cover design, we really expected a slab of drunken blackdeaththrashing madness here. And that’s what we got! All the usual influences rear their heads: Venom, Bulldozer, Sodom…you know the deal, you know the sound, you don’t really need to hear this to know exactly what it sounds like. They’re musically adept, especially the drummer, but really, it’s a lot of the same old, same old. And the lyrics, man, I know this is metal, and I can hang, but songs like “Analfisted by Satan” and “Sex Slave Zombie” set the stupid-bar at an astonishingly low level.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL377

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

BARE BONES, Defleshed (2008, self-released)

The skull:
To me, the best thing about this cover is how the font of the title is so similar to the logo of the band Defleshed. I wonder if Bare Bones even realizes they did that? They probably just subconsiously associate that typeface with the word, without questioning why. “We should call it ‘Defleshed.'” “Woah, yeah, like a bare bone man!” “Exactly.” Anyway, this is just a one color, photocopied skull, way short on teeth. It’s nice and big, unadorned and unobscured by text. I wonder if they were able to save money by using the same screen for the CD booklet and the shirt?

The music:
It seems like only yesterday, but in fact it was 290 days ago (to be exact) that I was last required to listen to this boring, entry-level Polish death metal band. Then, I was reviewing their first demo; now, I’m reviewing their second and last demo. To be brief: they didn’t get any better.
— Friar Johnsen