Monthly Archives: May 2014

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SQUEALER, End of the World  (2013, self-released)

The skull:
End of the World? More like End of Album Cover Ideas. I know, that’s not even funny, but if they’re not gonna try, why should I? This guy looks tired, or in some form of despair, and perhaps it’s because he’s just endured a trip to the optometrist, one that ended in pupil dilation, which explains the sunglasses. But then it’s all a fraud, because skulls don’t have eyeballs. Squealer just doesn’t get it, man.

The music:
Did you know there have been six metal bands to have recorded under the name Squealer? Three have been German, and the most successful of the lot is this one — and they’re still pretty weak. No doubt, they’re capable, maybe even decent at times, but they’re still no more than standard-issue German melodic speed/power metal, right off the factory assembly line. Or at least, that’s how they started out. No matter their direction, most of these tunes are about as faceless as it gets. When they’re in power metal mode, it’s somewhere between Not Fragile, Scanner and the weakest Iron Savior tunes — at the best of times. Squealer didn’t remain static in their evolution, which you have to give them credit for, but then their new frontiers weren’t all that impressive either. When they tried to change their sound, as heard on “Fade Away,” they’re a sorry excuse for modern gothic-tinged metal, like latter-day Sentenced covering Sisters of Mercy. Seems Squealer has flirted with a Moonspell-ish gothic direction more than once, too, as also heard in “To Die For (…Your Sins).” Boredom eternal. It’s difficult to determine why this self-released compilation exists, and why the Japanese wanted a piece of it. But here it is, in case you feel like you missed the train on the mighty Squealer or something. Might as well pre-order that 6xLP Chinchilla box set while you’re at it.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL505

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AMORAL, Show Your Colors  (2009, Spinefarm)

The skull:
A gang of young Finnish rapscallions went on a spraypainting spree throughout Helsinki in 2009, armed with black cans of paint and a stencil of a skull wearing a black headband. Each of the kids was successful in conveying whatever message they were trying to convey, except for young Tomi’s stencil, which was mangled on the bus ride across town. The bus was packed, and some huge 300 lb. Finnish creep sat on the stencil, which caused total headband failure once Tomi started his tagging. Tomi was, very sadly, killed crossing the street after spraying his very first mark. To honor his memory, the lads took his fucked-up stencil and tagged the city with the pattern thousands of times over before getting caught. But others followed their example, and now the image is as prevalent throughout the city as those “Obey” Andre the Giant stickers you used to see all over the States.

The music:
These Finns have been around since 2001 and have gone through a drastic musical evolution, starting as a technical death metal band, morphing into a more straightforward death/thrash sound, and currently playing classy melodic power metal. This album is their fourth, and from what I gather, the one that lost as many fans as it gained for the band. I’m glad I wasn’t biased going into this album — I hadn’t actually given much time to Amoral’s first few albums so had no expectation listening to Show Your Colors. I’m eager to check their earlier material out now, and the later ones, but taken for what it is, Show Your Colors is a well-written slab of buoyant, colorful, melodic metal. The choruses are huge, as in “Release,” which includes the line “nothing will remain as it was before,” an apparent mission statement and defiant message to disgruntled fans. The rest of the album shines brightly and soars proudly, touchstones being post-Criss Savatage, latter-day Nocturnal Rites, TNT, Dokken and the most AOR-leaning Helloween tunes (“I Can,” “If I Could Fly,” “First Time”). But Amoral plays it even cleaner and crisper than any of that. Yeah, they’re so streamlined that they edge toward feeling antiseptic. Yet the songwriting, playing and crystal clear tones of vocalist Ari Koivunen (who sounds a bit auto-tuned here, unfortunately) are impossible to not enjoy if you like any of the aforementioned. Apparently Amoral’s early work gained them a number of dedicated fans, fans that do not appreciate where they took their music with Show Your Colors. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI0ZOtinDzA — Jesus Christ, people, let a band grow.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL504

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PENTAGRAM, Sub-Basement  (2012, Svart)

The skull:
We throw a lot of wisecracks around here at Big Dumb Skulls, but we’re writing a blog about skull album covers in metal — lots of these beauties deserve snarky, sarcastic commentary. It’s a lotta chuckles here a BDS HQ, but every now and then we unearth a cover that is legitimately great art. Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains comes to mind, as does Autopsy’s Macabre Eternal. This one, however, might be the finest of them all. What I would give for a chance to saunter through this surrealistic catacomb for just five minutes, marveling at its magnificence and wondering why more bands with an inkling to exalt the skull couldn’t aspire to this. But then I suppose we all would have missed seeing skulls balancing warheads on their heads or having skateboards broken over their noggins. There’s room for it all, but god, this amazing album cover puts to shame 99% of the Skullection.

The music:
Regrettably, this great cover was assigned to a limited vinyl-only reissue of a middling Pentagram album. And a picture disc, at that (not sure how the full cover works into the packaging, as I don’t own the actual article). At least it made it to vinyl-size. This is when Pentagram began its precipitous decline in quality. Sub-Basement, originally released in 2001, is a full step down from its predecessor, Review Your Choices, and finds Bobby Liebling scraping the bottom of his ’70s archive barrel. He was also starting to sound as awful as he looked, although his voice is still decent here, not the total wreck it was by the time the next album rolled around. I’ll always have massive respect for the man and I consider myself a Pentagram fan (albums one through three, and all that ’70s stuff, rank extremely high on my favorites list), but this one is where it all started to feel tired. Yes, the world has finally embraced Liebling’s mad genius, and for that I’m grateful, it’s just too bad their best albums are long in the past. But what about Sub-Basement? “Bloodlust,” the title track and its intro, and “Drive Me to the Grave” are decent, although much of the rest feels pedestrian, as if, for the first time, the guys in the band (Liebling and Joe Hasselvander) were clocking in at the shop rather than entering the studio with a real fire under their collective ass. Still, it has its moments, and Hasselvander handles all instruments with impressive panache. Nah, it’s not even close to a total disaster, it just sometimes feels half-baked, and that’s not acceptable, even in the world of doom metal.
— Friar Wagner

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CORE, Act of Hate (2012, Southcore)

The skull:
As an example of the mushroom cloud skull, this is as close to the archetype as you could reasonably expect a cover to come. It’s well drawn, and the ruined city beneath is a nice touch. I couldn’t say why the whole thing needed to be slathered in a thick layer of shit brown, though, except to speculate that Core were actually running down some kind of BDS checklist when they conceived of this artwork. Sure, this album was released 11 months before we Friars convened at this virtual monastery, but the will and desire of The Council are so strong that I suspect the entire human race feels the pull of The Skull in their dreams, like some vast Jungian synchronicity. I think it’s only a matter of time before some band designs their cover with the express intent of landing a spot in these hallowed halls, and I should say, such shameless attempts at currying The Council’s favor are highly likely to work, so get on it, ye bands of narrow vision!

The music:
Core never released an album, only some demos and some compilation tracks, and this disc collects them all together. In 2013, you might think that a band called Core were a technical death metal band or something, but in 1995, when this band was in its heyday, a name like Core immediately signaled that you were gonna get some shitty Pantera-inspired groove thrash. It’s kind of hard to remember those dark times, because that style of music has almost entirely gone away, but back in the mid 90s, these sorts of shitty Far Beyond Driven-meets-Roots amalgams were positively everywhere, and inescapable. Creatively bankrupt and aesthetically impotent, this stuff was the pits 20 years ago and it hasn’t gotten any better since. That said, guitarist/vocalist Dejan Knezevic is currently in a band called Pelvic Meatloaf, and I’m sure they’re awesome.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL502

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DEATHEVOKER, Eternally Rot  (2012, demo)

The cover:
A stylish skull, this one, encircled to bring out the wrath this guy’s going through: drowned in slime, maggots, tendrils, offal and various other unpleasant junk. Par for the course for a death metal skull, basically. This is clearly inspired by Dan Seagrave and could have been a demo cover from the good ol’ days of Carnage or Dismember. It actually closely resembles the artwork on Dismember’s 1990 demo, Reborn in Blasphemy. With the logo looking 1001% Swedish and traditional gothic font used for the demo title, you don’t have to be a fancypants Nostradamus to figure out what kind of music Deathevoker plays. It’s a good little piece of art from this Malaysian band whose every release to date features a skull or skulls — we Friars and the ever-onlooking Council hail their good taste!

The music:
While I figured this demo would totally sound like demo-era Dismember, there’s a bit more going on here. Even if many riffs — monolithic, cruel and raw in the finest Swedish tradition — are deadringers for Dismember, the vocals are of a more scathing, unhinged sort, not as low as a Karki or Petrov, more like a synthesis of early King Fowley (Deceased) and early Pete Helmkamp (Order From Chaos) with a bit of a black metal snarl on the fringes. And they will, occasionally, add a melodic sequence that recalls a majestic Metallica or Megadeth passage, veering closer than you’d guess to balls-out power metal in these rare instances. It’s still death metal through and through, but Deathevoker are somewhat refreshing in that they use their considerable abilities to carve out something relatively unique rather than treading the same old boards most other retro-minded bands are content to.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL501

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MAKE, Trephine (2011, self-released)

The skull:
Fun fact of the day: a trephine is the saw used to cut a hole in a skull for surgery. This skull looks like the sort of thing that turns up in a museum as an example of prehistoric brain surgery, probably accomplished with a sharpened piece of volcanic glass. Which is to say: no trephine was involved (probably). Still, it’s a nice skull, and an impressive skull-hole, and the white-on-white design is one we rarely encounter here at Skull HQ, so I’ll award points for the cleanliness of the composition. The skull could be bigger though. Just sayin’.

The music:
Spacey, atmospheric stoner doom, you might call this. I’m reminded in places of the more ambient passages from Mastodon’s Crack the Skye, but I’m sure Make also spends a lot of time listening to the droning sounds of early 00s post-metal. They’re just not as abrasive as Neurosis or Isis or their ilk. The mood of the album is somewhat undone by the generic, rasping vocal delivery, and the clean vocals are hardly an improvement. (The bassist and guitarist are both credited with vocals, but it sounds like one guy is more like the hype man than a proper co-singer.) The reverb-drenched tremolo sections, which would fit on a Deafheaven album, are overdone, but when the band sticks to big riffs and classic Sabbath-inspired doom, they do occasionally get something of a groove going (“Surrounded by Silent Lies” stands out on this count). This is well done stuff, but it’s way too much of the same thing over and over again. The album is an hour long, but it feels longer. Post-doom is not my thing, and for all I know, it’s not a “thing” at all, but these days, pretty much everything has been “post”ed, and I don’t see why doom should be left out. If posty things are to your liking, and you like your metal slow, smoldering, and echoey, then Make might do you right.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL500

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CHEST, MMXI  (2011, self-released)

The skull:
And lo did Skull #500 find enlightenment at long last. Floating through the desert for nigh on 17 turns ’round the sun seeking purpose in his bodiless purgatory, and presently teetering on total astral burnout, skull 500 finally felt deep pangs of hunger. So did his search lead him, if only for a moment, toward something perhaps even more existential than the meaning of death, purgatory and the afterlife. With considerable surprise he did find the Lophophora williamsii cactus plant, or peyote, before him, dried in buttons and begging to be consumed. “It is kismet that I should stumble upon such heavenly bread!” said he as he ingested the buttons. In short time, he fell into a rapturous mescaline haze. Not only did it satisfy his pangs, but it achieved in him a vertigo hitherto unexperienced by man, beast or skull. He could not remember how or why he was crowned king those many years ago, or even what land he ruled, but screw it, he hadn’t a speck of care about any of that now. “How much of that shit did I eat???” he wondered. His name is Chester, King Chester, and he is absolutely wigging the fuck out.

The music:
There is precious little to report on here. Finland’s Chest play serviceable, standard-issue stoner rock/sludge, utterly adequate and likely reaching the low bar that freaks for this kind of stuff “demand” of their bonged-out leaders. But for anyone wanting a new, different, memorable, worthwhile or (gasp) adventurous musical experience, look elsewhere. Where Queens of the Stone Age are the Mensa wizards on high, come from a far distant planet to enslave us with their majesty, Chest are the couch potatoes scraping the bowl for remnants of smoke-able resin as they bicker about who has to venture into the outside world to secure the next batch of Cheetos and Mellow Yellow.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL499

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MORBID YELL, Death Desecration  (2004, demo)

The skull:
Hard to gather exactly what’s happening amidst all the black and white noise, but it looks to this friar like the skull of a man who got lost hiking in a jungle and became ensnared in all manner of flora. The harder he struggled, the tighter the vines, branches and stems pulled, eventually suffocating the guy, whose face was eaten off by a band of rabid wild boars. That’s great news for the boars and Big Dumb Skulls! Crappy for the guy who wandered too far out into the wilderness, but we have it on good faith he was a deadbeat dad that deserved it.

The music:
Word on the street is that in the Spanish city of A Coruna, there existed several morbid-sounding metal bands who took similar names at the very same time. Morbid Commotion and Morbid Conniption, both now long-defunct, left the dudes in this then-unnamed band seriously frustrated. What to call their own brand of morbid metal? “Commotion” and “conniption” were both taken, and Texas band Morbid Scream had long owned that name, so it was decided, rather reluctantly, to just call it Morbid Yell and get on with business. (The recent reactivation of Chile’s Death Yell offers exciting possibilities for a seriously yelly tour package.) This is Morbid Yell’s first demo. The recording gives the music a chilling, distant quality, like it’s being communicated from several feet underground, all of it drenched in reverb while cymbals clang mercilessly in their quest to give headaches to the lot of you. This is fairly standard black/death/thrash — primitive, anguished and ugly, played by two Spanish brutes who probably think Watain are the wimpiest band in existence and that Inquisition have sold out. It’s not great, but not entirely worthless either. One thing’s for sure: this tape would have definitely landed them a deal with Wild Rags if that label was still active.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL498

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DARK DEVOTION, Rehearsal 2009 (2009, demo)

The skull:
Wary be, ye hirsute skulls whose mangy locks dangle from thy rotting domes, lest thy foetid tresses become entangled admidst the stalagmites upthrust from the deep recesses in which ye dwell, and ye be pulled down and indeed impaled thereon. Thy graven stars, powerful though they ordinarily be, shall afford thee no protection from such odious entrapment, and long may ye tarry against thy wills in these lowly places. Thy dark devotion in such times shall verily be tested sore.

The music:
Only ten copies of this rehearsal demo were released, and naturally, I am one of the damned souls who owns one. After hearing the merest rumors of their 2008 opus #08, I decamped to Ciudad Victoria in Mexico, where I made nightly rounds of the town’s cemetaries. One fateful evening, I caught a glimpse of a ghoulishly painted man making blasphemous entreaties among the fog-wreathed sepulchers, and I followed him thereafter to discover his lair. I patiently surveilled the location until such a time as he welcomed several other corpselike persons into his company, and then from the bowels of that foreboding place, I heard the sinister strains of the most unholy black metal. I laid a freshly severed goat head before their threshold and hid myself, knowing they would find my offering. This ritual I repeated for 13 nights, and on the following evening, which was indeed marked by a full moon, the band did not gather at their black conventicle (having no doubt more sinister affairs to attend to elsewhere), but on the spot where nightly I left my grim sacrifice, a starkly illustrated CDR was left. I ran with this gift back to my meager lodgings and immediately inserted it into the player, whereby I was assaulted by the shittiest, most cliche black metal imaginable, and I realized how truly I had wasted my time for the better part of two months.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL497

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KICKHUNTER, Hearts & Bones

The skull:
It’s possible that this cover was constructed in Photoshop, but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look like a photo of a real tattoo, and what a doozy it is. I desperately hope that the guitarist got this tattoo explicitly for his album cover. That would be some real dedication. It’s not quite as good as three guys getting the Exhorder logo tattooed on their arms, but it’s still pretty serious. I especially hope that he did this to surprise his bandmates. He shows up one day at rehearsal, a couple weeks before the band is scheduled to hit the studio, and he dramatically pulls off his leather jacket to reveal his new ink. “Behold! The cover of our debut album!” “But, dude, the album is gonna be called Hearts & Bones. Like, more than one heart,” the singer immediately notes. “God damn it, you’re such a fucking dick. I did this for you fucking guys! Can’t you for once be happy?” “No, man, it’s not like that! It’s cool! But like, don’t you think it would be cooler if you added like another couple hearts or something? There’s still room…” “GOD DAMN IT JIMMY! I’M NOT ADDING MORE HEARTS!” “Jeez, dude, calm down, I’m just saying. I mean, no one asked you to get a fucking tattoo for the band! Like, maybe I was already planning on getting my denim jacket airbrushed with the cover art? Did you ever think of that?” And so on. But, happy ending: they worked it out and made like three or four totally shitty albums together.

The music:
Is there anything worse than new hair metal? At least in the 80s, when such crap was popular, you could imagine some percentage of the assholes engaged in this sort of behavior were doing it cynically to get laid, or were just going with the flow, having no sense of good or bad. But in the 00s? You’d have to fucking love hair metal to make an album sounding like this, which is tantamount to getting a tattoo on your forehead that proclaims, “I have shitty taste in music!” I mean, the skull tattoo already implies as much, but I’m talking about making it explicit. Anyway, I’m not going to be able to make much in the way of concrete comparisons to describe this awful band, because I hate this shit with the energy of a thousand suns, but in broad strokes, Kickhunter falls on the bluesier, less glammy side of the hair metal spectrum. More like Tora Tora than Sleez Beez. Or maybe like Kingdom Come with a much crappier singer. Fuck, I hate myself for even knowing these bands exist, but Kickhunter, they’re trying to SOUND like them. I’m ashamed for them, and sad for the world.
— Friar Johnsen