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