Monthly Archives: May 2014

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GRANTIG, So Muss Es Sein  (2008, Drakkar Entertainment GMBH)

The skull:
We’ve seen quite a few iterations of the Human Skull + Ram Horns motif here at Big Dumb Skulls. As we near Skull #500 in the run up to 666, you can bet we’ve seen better ones than this, although this one deserves some attention thanks to its stylized take on the “concept.” I’m as tired of browns as any other metal fan long in the tooth, and this cover uses nearly every shade of it. That said, it’s a pretty okay piece of art, as these sorts of things go, but that’s a pretty low bar we’re setting. I’m sure some hanger-on Grantig fan somewhere in the depths of Bavaria has this skull tattooed on his arm, and probably carries the band’s gear into the van for them. Then they’re all like “Sorry, no room in the van, buddy, but we love your tattoo!” They speed off to a gig where three other Grantig diehards await their arrival. So it must be.

The music:
Modern metal from Germany, exactly like a synthesis of Pantera and Black Label Society but with lyrics in German. I will concede they’re no slouches at their chosen craft, even if the craft they’ve chosen (German Southern Groove Metal?) has absolutely no appeal to this friar. This is the kind of jockstrap thump-rock that impressionable under-age kids half listen to and half care about when they’re chugging ’em down at the back of the pub while the band rocks its balls off.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL495

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BLAKAGIR, Carpathian Art of Sin (2007, Pulverised)

The skull:
This is maybe my least favorite type of BDS, where someone at the last minute decided that the cover image just wasn’t gnarly enough on its own and so added a translucent skull to beef it up. Is this skull Carpathian? Is he artful? Sinful? Who could possibly guess? Probably the skull was a little more solid originally, but he caught a glimpse of Blakagir’s ridiculous logo, bristling as it is with olde tyme weapons, and he willed himself into transparency, hoping to escape altogether the shame of appearing on this meaningless cover. Too little, too late, Carpathian headbone! You belong to Blakagir, now!

The music:
I was fully expecting shitty black metal, because who else but a shitty black metal band would include “Carpathian” in their title? Plus, look at the logo. But, this isn’t black metal, or even metal at all; it’s basically an entire album of pretentious intro tracks: all pianos, synth strings, and spooky sound effects. In short, this is one of the most annoying albums I’ve ever listened to. It’s all the work of a single guy (surprise!) named L.O.N. (“Loves Orchestral Noodling”), who for some reason fronts several other one-man bands. Maybe his policy in those bands is to never start an album with a stupid intro, and this is his side project to get out all the awesome, stupid intro ideas he’s nevertheless come up with over the years. In a lot of ways, this is like Glenn Danzig’s Black Aria, a kind of pseudo-classical music project written by a guy who is far less accomplished as a composer than he surely believes. Also, this isn’t catchy in the dumb way Danzig’s magnum opus was, sometimes. It’s not that L.O.N. is a total incompetent; he seems to be a reasonably good piano player, and the occasional guitar work (mostly acoustic) is nice, but the guy has nothing of interest to say, musically. If any of these pieces appeared on a proper album, you’d skip every one of them. I suppose there’s something to be said for writing music that at least suggests there’s something better waiting in the next track, but that’s hardly a talent worth stretching to album length.
— Friar Johnsen

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E-FORCE, The Curse…  (2014, Mausoleum)

The skull:
Hubba hubba! Here we have a scene depicting the goings on at some German strip club, around 5 AM, in which twins Grunhilde and Brunhilde get all kindsa cray-cray together after a long night of dancing. The wall of the club where the twins strut their hot stuff is painted to depict a skull upon a moon-like planetary surface. The skull looks on, impossibly frustrated with the scene before him. He looks on sternly, and jealously, thinking: “God damn it, I forgot to bring paper money. These girls aren’t gonna give me the time of day.” This is the curse of the skull.

The music:
It’s impossible to listen to E-Force without putting them in the context of the Voivod timeline. The band’s main selling point, of course, is that bassist/vocalist Eric Forrest filled some gigantic shoes when he joined Voivod in the mid ’90s, fulfilling both the vocal (Snake) and bass (Blacky) duties, replacing those who are impossible to replace. Negatron is a rare low ebb in the band’s discography (although it certainly has its moments), while Phobos found the reinvented Voivod finding their feet. Forrest sounded for-real on Phobos, not forced and out-of-place as he did on Negatron. And that was it for Forrest-era Voivod. While the guy never seemed entirely integrated as a Voivod member, he got close and performed well enough, especially in the live setting where the band remained at the top of their game. And let’s face it: the cards were stacked against him from the start. Voivod reunited with Snake, and eventually with Blacky too, and Forrest wasted no time forming this band. E-Force was first based in Quebec, but when Forrest moved to France, the membership changed accordingly. And here comes the sad truth: E-Force is not a great band and The Curse…, their third, is not a great album. Forrest’s vocals are raspy, aggressive modern thrash shouts, akin to a metalcore kid trying to sound like latter-day Darren Travis (Sadus), and the chunky riffs are the same faceless things we’ve heard played over and over again in countless other modern thrash bands, or by old-school bands who now sound thicker and chunkier and appeal to the young’uns who weren’t even born when Pleasure to Kill and Infernal Overkill were released. There’s energy in abundance here, and they’re all technically good players. Glen Drover even pops up as a guest soloist, but unless you worship the last few Destruction albums, post-Max Sepultura, and the last couple Kreator albums — and you surely could be into worse music than that, of course — then you probably don’t need to bother with this. Even a Voivod completist like myself draws the line at tangential branches of the family tree like this one. Union Made…Echobrain…E-Force…hardly mandatory stuff. [Apparently it’s not the curse of the skull we’re witnessing on the cover, but, according to the final song on the album, “The Curse of the Cunt.”]
— Friar Wagner

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TJOLGTJAR, Halloween (2007, Dipsomaniac)

The skull:
For a pumpkin skull, I guess this is pretty cool, although it’s just the poster to Halloween II, slightly altered. The original painting appears to have extended the pumpkinny parts pretty far down the sides of the skull (almost all the way to the jaw, in fact), but here the squash is cropped into something like a Dutch boy haircut. No wonder the skull is so angry – his dad should have coughed up the $10 for a trip to the barber, but instead he just sat his pumpkinskullson down, dropped a salad bowl over his head, and went at the gourd with the clippers. How humiliating! Now our hero will never land a date for the skullprom!

The music:
Tjolgtjar is a one-man bedroom black metal band, and Halloween basically sounds exactly as you’d expect (shitty), but in truth there are a few things setting this apart from most of its fellows. For starters, it would appear that J.R. Preston (the one man) actually played drums on this, although it’s a little hard to say for sure, the sound is so bad. Secondly, while writing a concept album based on the score and text of John Carpenter’s Halloween isn’t exactly an idea of staggering brilliance, it’s at least a little more conceptually ambitious than some Frenchman trying to remake In the Nightside Eclipse for the 10,000th time. That’s about all the praise I can lavish on this horrible album, though. The drums sound like they started on a surf rock garage demo from the 60s that got mangled in the cassette deck. The frequently out-of-tune guitars were obviously plugged straight from a digital distortion pedal into the 4-track or whatever. And the vocals are, of course, your standard issue black metal frogman croak. As far as I can tell, the lyrics are more or less a literally restatement of the plot of the film, making this a pointless endeavor from every angle.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL492

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CRUX, Terrific Warrior  (1992, demo)

The skull:
[The scene: post-battle, two military men wander a wasteland that has been hosting hundreds of rotting dead for weeks. They come upon a freshly defleshed skull.]

Commander: How well did that warrior fight, Lieutenant?
Lieutenant: He was terrific. Just terrific.
Commander: Does he deserve the Feather Commendation?
Lieutenant: He certainly does, Commander. He was a terrific warrior.
Commander: “Terrific warrior,” you say? I love that demo!

The music:
Unfortunately, I could not find a copy of the Terrific Warrior demo to review, but its songs, as well as some songs from the band’s first demo, 1991’s Rev Smrti, are not only the same, but also appeared on their one and only album, 1993’s Rev Smrti. Confused? It’s a weird little history, but one worth investigating if you dig early Root or black/thrash type stuff in the vein of Sodom, Bulldozer and later Norwegian band Aura Noir. Their music is crude but not exactly primitive, and generally recommendable. The fact that two of Crux’s members played on lots of the classics by Root should tell you there’s a fairly respectable performance level. Crux isn’t innovative in the least, but the spirit is there, and with a handful of beastly yet memorable riffs and some nutso gravel-laced vocals, they’re worth checking out.
— Friar Wagner

 

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CURARE, Zeit (2000, self-released)

The skull:
The deep scratches made in a wall barely covered in peeling paint, plus the feverishly scribbled title (which means “Time”) are nearly enough to suggest a truly grim vision of a long-incarcerated prisoner clutching at the last straws of his sanity. But then there’s that stupid skull, which was clearly painted over top of the scratching, making it clear that this grim prison was shuttered for years before it was opened as some kind of vaguely historical tourist destination, and in which some asshole teen on a field trip managed to break away from the class long enough to stencil in spray paint the rad skull he designed for the skateboarding company he’s going to start just as soon as he gets his fucking degree, man. The desperate etchings of a broken man wiped out by the callous vandalism of some punk: same as it ever was.

The music:
This is vaguely industrial-sounding groove metal sung in German, which in my world means Curare are a Rammstein knockoff, even if I can objectively note that Curare are at a minimum more metal. They’re definitely boring, though. The real bitch is that this almost sounds like it could have been good. Their better riffs aren’t a million miles removed from, say, Pitch Shifter in the early 90s, but they’re just off enough to be totally dull. For starters, they don’t capture the sociopathic bleakness that was encoded in everything Pitch Shifter did (before that remix EP that signaled the end of all good things.) And then the singer in Curare sounds less like an angry anarchist and more like a guy who’s just trying to get the party started, or at least trying to impress girls with dyed black hair and Siouxsie Sioux eye makeup. At their most keyboardy, Curare sound a little like Rabies-era Skinny Puppy, which is just another strike against them. We don’t cover a lot of industrial metal here at Skull HQ, and as with most of what we come across, Curare aren’t totally awful, and if this sort of thing is literally all you listen to, then maybe you’d even like them, but I think it’s a lot more likely you just wouldn’t totally hate them.
—Friar Johnsen

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RAM, Death  (2012, Metal Blade)

The skull:
Friends of the (horned) skull, Ram, return with another album cover featuring a human skull with curly ram horns affixed to it. The look is deliberate ’80s kitsch, and it’s an ugly mess. I think they’re trying to impress us here at BDS, utilizing every single popular feature of your typical skull cover: horns, crosses, ruined city, blood, an ominous winged figure. You can imagine this as a video game. The background is static, except for the upward-moving blood streaks, which pulse with each hit of the player’s fire button. That button allows the player to shoot crosses into the eye sockets of the skull, which moves erratically, gaining speed and intensity as the player progresses to each new level. Once you shoot 1000 crosses into the skull’s eyes, you’re at the 10th level. The skull disappears as the winged figure at the back becomes animated, growing slowly in an attempt to overtake the player. The shooter needs to shoot 100 crosses each into the figures wings or lose the game in defeat. Naturally, Ram music plays in the background. It’s a whole lot better than that Journey video game, right?

The music:
How much you like this depends on how much you like Iron Maiden and don’t mind other bands sounding a lot like Iron Maiden. Since Maiden themselves hardly sound like this anymore, Ram is a sufficient analog for the galloping, energetic, double-guitar attack that the English legends patented and turned into a very profitable industry. Ram is a good band, with good riffs and an earnest approach that’s hard to dislike, but how much you like them will depend on how adventurous a listener you are. Do you go to a restaurant that offers a menu loaded with choices and order the same dish every time? Do you go to the exact same place every single year for vacation? Do you go to Baskin Robbins and order a double scoop of vanilla? Ram isn’t all Iron Maiden worship though. Sometimes you hear traces of Judas Priest.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL489

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TROXYGEN, Demo (2012, demo)

The skull:
This skull clealy suffers from some kind of hydroencephaly – look at how huge his dome is – and has attempted to relieve the pressure by ramming a cross into his forehead. Except, wait, is that forked tongue part of the cross? What the hell? This doesn’t make any sense. And why is he wearing mirrored glasses? Does he think some bitchin’ shades will distract the ladies from his enormous, bulbous, horned head? If so, this dude is seriously living in denial.

The music:
Troxygen describe themselves as “crudge metal,” which I assume is a portmanteau of “crust” and “sludge,” although as far as I can tell, they’re just a shitty death/thrash band (“dash metal,” to those in the know). Yes, they slow it down to almost dirgey tempos at times, but that would at best make them “croom metal,” and that’s assuming there was some actual crust in the sound, which there isn’t. “Crudge” nevertheless rings true, because that’s a descriptor that absolutely no one would associate with quality. These two songs are dreadfully dull and performed without passion. Truly unnecessary stuff.
—Friar Johnsen

SKULL488

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DAY OF EXECUTION, Dead Burning to Ashes  (2012, Brewery Prod.)

The skull:
Here we have yet another album cover depicting some post-apocalyptic nonsense, a cover that’s probably supposed to look bad-ass but really looks sorta stupid. Whether or not the technical execution of the idea is good or not is a moot point when the concept you’re working with is artistically bankrupt. A skull chomping down on demolished skyscrapers — oh boy! He’s late to the party. The bomb, or wrecking ball, got here way before you, Mr. Skull — all you get are sloppy seconds.

The music:
These Bulgarians play simplistic death metal that seems to draw equal influence from Dying Fetus, Sinister and Bolt Thrower, but without any distinctive, distinguishing element of their own. While it certainly could be worse (their playing skills are decent), this has about as much appeal as that latest Massacre album. And if you’ve heard that, you know what I mean:  redundancy incarnate. I have a soft spot for the almost Psychotic Waltz-esque lead guitar tones, as heard to best effect in “Warriors of Uruk” — they’ve got the sound down, that vapory, cosmic, heavily chorused sort of thing. Unfortunately they don’t make as much out of it as Mssrs. Rock and McAlpin. These leads, though, keep Dead Burning to Ashes from feeling entirely vacant. Ultimately this band’s sound would have already sounded tired back in 1995…it certainly cannot hold much appeal here in 2014. Bonus points for the cover of Bolt Thrower’s “Cenotaph”? Nah, not really, but nice try anyway.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL487

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OMINOUS CRUCIFIX, The Spell of Damnation (2012, F.D.A. Rekotz)

The skull:
This all started with a photo of a ghastly scene painted in the alcove of some church, and the weird incongruity of the votive candles beneath a violent image of the damned, framed by gothic stonework, would have made for a perfectly excellent cover on its own. But this was not enough for Onimous Crucifix. Presented with the photo, they said, “¡No, se necesita una cavalera!” So then the artist spent about five minutes in Photoshop to paste a skull on top of the photo, and he presented it to the band again for review. “¡Ahora necesita una serpiente!” “¿Una serpiente, también?” the artist asked, exasperated, but he was already back in Photoshop, cramming a snake into the skull’s eyehole. How did it get in there? Who knows, and who cares. The photo was already ruined, so if they want a snake, they can have a fucking snake. “¿Es bueno?” “Es muy malo! Gracias!”

The music:
Considering how overly processed and artificial-sounding most modern death metal has become, it’s nice to hear some good, old fashioned, by-the-numbers material like this, played by dudes who just don’t care if their timing is not perfect and their drumming without flams. This is mid-paced stuff that reminds me more than anything of the old Dutch band Thanatos, although this being Mexican death metal, you can also expect at least a little Deicide in the mix. The riffs are unpretentious but interesting, and the guitar solos tend toward gratuitous whammy workouts, with nary a sweep in sight. It’s marvelous. Of course, a little of this sort of thing goes a long way, at least for me, and I’m not sure if this is so good that I’d consider adding it to the period classics of the style that are already in my collection, but honestly, I’m tempted nevertheless. This is a rock-solid album that sounds evil in the way the best old death metal did, before it was taken over by nerds with 7-string guitars. Me gusta.
— Friar Johnsen