SOCIAL DESPAIR, Social Despair (2007, demo)

The skull:
I don’t recall seeing another skull with only half a jaw. For all the violence we’ve seen visited on skulls here at Skull HQ, this seems the most brutal. What holds the thing on, I can’t say, but I bet it hurts like all hell. Fortunately, this guy looks to be riding out his Hellraiser-esque eternity in style, what with that kickin’ mullet and badass fangs. He’s probably like, “Yeah, I’m all chained up through a hole in my top, and my bottom jaw is fucking busted in half, but they didn’t even ding the fangs! Suckers!” That’s some Myth of Sisyphus-level existentialism right there, folks.

The music:
Obviously, this is a thrash band. Obviously. The name, the logo, and of course the cover all give it away. But, they don’t have the sound of a trendhopping rethrash act. Instead, they sound like a bunch of meatheads who wanted to play death metal but found it was just too hard, so they dumbed it down and arrived at some kind of remedial thrash, the sort played by high school bands in 1991 who mostly decorated their denim vests with Metallica patches but who just discovered Deicide. The sound is awful, the playing sloppy, the riffs dull, and the vocals unlistenable. At least the songs are short. Interestingly, Social Despair appear to have released an album only last year — there’s proof of it on their Facebook page — but despite an even more awesome BDS cover, the album doesn’t appear on Metal Archives and I can’t find sound samples for it. So, maybe Social Despair got their act together and turned into a good band, although I can’t say I have particularly high hopes for a record called Refusal for Abreaction.
— Friar Johnsen