Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

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SUCKING VOID, The Scavenger (2012, demo)

The skull:
The stupid logo is a dead giveaway that this is a modern release, but this art could otherwise totally have fronted some cult death metal demo from the late 80s, passed from trader to trader in increasingly rotten-sounding dubs, the cover getting more and more washed out as the Xerox generations pile up. Scratched, cracked, dripping, and covered in crawly things, not to mention stretched like a necro El Greco, this skull looks to be having an absolutely shitty afterlife, and we’re actually seeing him here in the prime of his digitally distributed glory. Sucking Void Skull, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

The music:
The Scavenger sounds like Earache Records 1990, an even mix of Harmony Corruption, Symphonies of Sickness, and the faster moments on Warmaster, but with a modern production that surprisingly doesn’t deflate the oldschool vibe. The riffing is a little basic at times, and the vocals less than charismatic, but this kind of oldschool stuff really gets me off, and Sucking Void remain committed throughout to songcraft in a way that modern death metal rarely does. The playing is sharp and everything sounds really great here, much better than most death metal, in fact. I didn’t expect much from this short demo with a silly cover, but Sucking Void are surprisingly not to be fucked with. Highly recommended if you enjoy the aforementioned oldies.
— Friar Johnsen

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PRIMEVAL REALM, Primordial Light (2014, Pure Steel)

The skull:
Although the ultimate example of a skull-hill has been deemed insufficiently stupid to qualify for admission to the Skullection, this new work from Pennsylvania’s Primeval Realm more than bridges the gap. Golgatha, the hill on which Jesus was supposedly crucified, was translated to mean “place of the skull,” and here we have the most literal possible interpretation of that translation, even if it seems weird to pair such obvious Christian imagery with language (Primeval, Primordial) that is clearly meant to suggest a far earlier time than a mere 2000 years ago. But, whatever! Who are we to poo-poo so fine a skull hill as this? The poor skull looks like those crosses are giving him the damndest headache, and I especially appreciate that even as a metaphor made real, this skull looks beat-up and toothless. I guess it’s tough work propping up the Calvariæ Locus.

The music:
Obsessed-style doom is for sure not a favorite of mine, but Primordial Realm unquestionably do this style absolutely as well as it could possibly be done. The songwriting is top notch, with plenty of trad-metal hooks to temper the obligatory (if leaden) Sabbath nods, and a totally crushing production. I can’t say I’m entitely sold on guitarist/mastermind Joe Potash’s vocals, which have a kind of baritone, everyman temper to them, but his melodies are good enough to make up for his lackluster tone. Brian Leahy’s thick, humming Hammond lines easily fill the space sometimes too keenly-felt in single guitar bands, though he rarely steps out front. At their best, Primeval Realm channel early 90s Trouble, minus Eric Wagner (of course) and the signature twin-axe stylings of Chicago’s finest, and even a pale imitation (which Primeval Realm are not) of that band’s finest era can yield some impressive tunes. Of course, this is still doom metal, so by the end of the album, if you’re at all like me, you’ll be ready for it to stop, but believe me, as someone who is compelled to listen to a lot of mediocre doom metal, when you’re not scrambling to hit “stop” midway through the first tune, you’re doing great.
— Friar Johnsen

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SECRETS OF THE MOON, Warhead (2011, Lupus Lounge)

The skull:
“Psst. Up here. It’s me, The Moon. I’ve got a secret for you. If you look hard enough, like if you really get close and look around, every skull has a baby head on it somewhere. It’s true! I know it sounds crazy, but I’m not shitting with you. Seriously. And man, once you get over that mind-blowing, let me tell you, I’ve got tons more secrets like that one, and I’d be totally glad to let you in on them. You just gotta do me one favor. Destroy the earth. Yeah, like blow up the whole planet. How’re you gonna do it? You’ve gotta figure that our yourself. I mean, yeah, I know how to do it, but I kinda can’t say. It’s complicated. Yeah, it’s one of those secrets I was telling you about. So anyway, think about it, and get back to me, but don’t take too long. Time’s a wastin’, if you know what I’m saying!”

The music:
Secrets of the Moon have been around in one form or another for a close to twenty years, and their brand of black metal is fairly well polished and sophisticated, even if it still lacks a fundamental originality. Immortal and Satyricon are meaningful comparisons, although Secrets of the Moon, at least on the one original included on this single, rarely take the tempo above “mid,” and I have no problem with that. Said original, “Seven Bells,” ably captures some of the vibe of the classic (first wave) antecedents to black metal as we know it now, touching on Sodom and Mercyful Fate in equal measure. The a-side of the single is a cover of Venom’s “Warhead,” so the band is clearly intentionally signalling their interest in pre-Darkthrone black metal, although I’m not sure it ever makes much aesthetic sense to cover Venom. Still, they do a perfectly fine job of it, even if their over-effected vocals make one long for the dulcet tones of Cronos.
— Friar Johnsen

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WILD ZOMBIE BLAST GUIDE, Wild Zombie Blast Guide (2012, self-released)

The skull:
This is some serious Rob Zombie meets HP Lovecraft shit right here. We’ve seen a lot of skulls wrapped up in the coils of snakes, but I’m not sure if we’ve seen any tentacled skulls before, and this quality of this illustration is quite high to boot. Of course, on a self-titled album by a band called Wild Zombie Blast Guide (which is a band full of dudes actually made up to look like zombies) you’d expect a cover that was at least vaguely zombie-like, and at the very least you’d expect to see a shotgun blast hole in the forehead, but if this is how the zombie band sells out its core principle, with a gloriously goofy big dumb skull, then who am I to complain?

The music:
Wild Zombie Blast Guide don’t appear in Metal Archives, which is usually a sign of a crappy metalcore band, but there’s really very little to distinguish this band from Soilwork, and I’m not even talking about late-period Soilwork, but their more vibrant early work. Certainly, this album isn’t on par with The Chainheart Machine or even Steelbath Suicide, but it’s of a piece with the better clones that arrived in the wake of those first two or three awesome albums by Helsinborg’s second-finest (Darkane still rules the roost!) It’s true, Wild Zombie Blast Guide suffers from generic vocals and lacks a distinct identity, but they do this sort of upbeat melodic death metal quite well, and while their lyrics are surely stupid, they’re not unavoidably intelligible, so it’s all good on that front. I really expected nothing but misery from this release but I’ll be damned if this ridiculous joke band isn’t secretly alright.
— Friar Johnsen

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EXCITER, The Dark Command (1997, Osmose)

The skull:
A barely-there skull floating translucently over what appears to be a volcano and some lightning (for some reason), this cover practically screams “Shitty Greek black metal,” but of course this is Exciter, one of the great grand-daddies of speed metal. I guess when they signed to Osmose, they looked at their labelmates’s covers and said, “Very well. If that is the way the winds are blowing, let it not be said we don’t also blow!” And they said it without even knowing that Simpsons reference.

The music:
This was Exciter’s “comeback” album, although looking back, they were not really gone for very long, only five years. Exciter is one of those bands I feel like I should enjoy, because I’m a good student of heavy metal history and I generally appreciate these elder statesmen-type bands, and because I’m generally inclined towards thrash and speed metal. But, Exciter has never much cranked my motor. I’ve got the first couple albums, and that always seemed like enough. I do actually own this album as well, because I found it used and cheap not long after it came out, and honestly, it’s not a bad album at all, even if it’s a little generic. When guitarist John Ricci reformed the band in the mid-90s, he did it without either of his classic-trio companions, and the result is an album that’s pretty good thrashy power metal, but which somehow doesn’t much satisfy as an Exciter album. And yes, I think I can say that without having ever been particularly satisfied by an Exciter album. New singer Jacques Belanger is like a bargain-basement Canadian Eric Adams, and while his voice is perfectly acceptable, he fails to bring the manic intensity that original (not-very-good) singer Dan Beehler had in spades. Plus, Beehler did it while playing drums (poorly) and that counts for a lot in my book. There are far worse comebacks, and something like this version of Exciter managed to keep the flame burning for another four albums, so I’m ready to give them a little credit, but not too much. Anyway, the original trio is back together, so I suppose it’s time for Exciter fans to start forgetting that the last 15 years ever happened.
— Friar Johnsen

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CULTES DES GHOULES, Häxan (2011, Hell’s Headbangers)

The skull:
There are at least four covers for this album (originally released on cassette, naturally, in 2008), and while one of them has two big dumb skulls, this lone entry with but one big dumb skull is, I believe, the Hell’s Headbanger issue. I’m also pretty sure this image is a screen cap of a cellphone pic of a CRT television paused on a VHS copy of some 8mm student horror film called Skull Communion or Chalice of the Skull or whatever, because what else would it be?

The music:
Primitive black metal, reminding me more of Bathory than Darkthrone. The sound is cruddy in the way that makes you think they asked the recording engineer to make it sound worse than it had to, just because that’s the sort of thing these kinds of bands like. Which is to say, this entire affair is one giant pose. But, whatever. Every scene has its own esoteric signifiers of authenticity. I expected this to be a completely amateur one-man-band situation, but it appears there is a four-man ensemble at work here, and truthfully, they’re not terrible players, but this music is so far from interesting to me that I’m struggling to not insult it reflexively, if only because I’m running really short on black metal insults after a year and a half of this blog. Basically, if you can imagine yourself liking a Polish black metal band with a French name and a Swedish album title, then you’ll almost certainly love this shit for reals.
— Friar Johnsen

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JESUS AIN’T IN POLAND, Freheit Macht Frei (2012, Grindpromotion)

The skull:
While inspecting the cloven skull before him on the autopsy table, the forensic pathologist said aloud, to no one but the imaginary medical procedural television director in his head, “This is without a doubt the worst sinus infection I have ever seen. No amount of pseudoephedrine was gonna clear this guy up. Hell of a way to go, if you ask me.” “Slain by snot,” he imagined the weary but wry protagonist answering, because even in his fantasies, the doctor was just a part of the supporting cast.

The music:
Maybe I’m going soft, or maybe I’ve just been beaten into submission by sheer numbers, but I’m starting to maybe develop a taste for grind, after these many years in the service of The Skull, listening to disc after disc of blasty Napalm Death worship. At the very least, it’s becoming less offputting to me, although I’m not sure I could cogently explain what makes one grind disc better than the next, except that the good ones tend not to sound like they were recorded on a boombox that crusty anarchists reclaimed from the dump. Jesus Ain’t In Poland is an incredibly stupid name, but they seem to have their shit together and their death-inflected grind mostly works for me. Their slower passages groove and afford the band the space to develop their riffs, and while their blasty bits are really not distinguishable from any other band working this style, they at least aren’t unlistenably obnoxious. Given the stylistic constraints of grind, I’m not sure it’s even possibly to impress with originality, and Jesus Ain’t In Poland certainly aren’t doing anything you haven’t heard before, but if you like grind (and aren’t in it for the shock value alone) then you’ll probably dig them.
— Friar Johnsen

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NEOANDERTALS, Australopithecus (2009, self-released)

The skull:
Behold, the first Big Dumb Skull (artist’s rendering). While the charter of the Skullection requires skulls to be human, The Council is not so speciesist as to deny the fundamental humanity of this early hominid, and in fact, The Council generally holds that the difference in intelligence between this ancestor and modern man is negligible. And believe me, The Council would know!

The music:
Neoandertals are a two piece outfit who play something along the lines of “drum and bass grindcore.” At times it really is fairly reminiscent of Brutal Truth, minus the guitars, as pointless as that sounds, but generally it works. But, that’s Neondertals in their ordinary configuration. This release was a one-off jam session between main man Rain Pohlak and the band’s original drummer, Roland Seer. To call this metal would probably be a bit of a stretch, but historically, the band is metal enough that they have earned admission to the Skullection based on their past works. Australopithecus is also a moderately interesting release that might hold some appeal for math rock fans, in particular devotees of Hella, and I’d say the math rock/metal crossover is fairly wide. The playing here is tight, and far more interesting than 99% of metal bands could possibly manage to improvise over the course of a couple days. That said, this is a document of a weekend jam session, so a certain amount of musical meandering is to be expected, and if you can’t hang with that kind of literal musical experimentation, you’re definitely not going to enjoy the sounds on offer here.
— Friar Johnsen

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QUILLS, Quills (2006, Galy)

The skull:
What is that, there behind the skull? A bird? A moth, a Rorschach inkblot? There don’t seem to be a single high-resolution scan of this cover anywhere on the internet, so it’s a bit hard to say what’s happening here. Is the skull sporting long sabre teeth, or are those just tail feathers? Why are his eye sockes glowing? This is a highly mysterious and tediously boring skull at the same time. Any more time spent pondering the dumb enigma of Quills’s cranial mascot is sure to be time wasted.

The music:
I didn’t expect much from Quills until I noticed they were on Galy Records, a label in Montreal with more than a few excellent bands (Martyr, Unexpect, Horfixion, Shades of Dusk, etc). And sure enough, Quills are not the sludgy doom band I expected, but something of a weird mix of Mastodon-style technical stoner metal (if such a thing can be said to exist) and highly controlled grindcore. The vocals are basically hardcore yelling (and are quite bad), but although this entire EP is under 8 minutes, there is still some excellent riffing on display, and the playing manages to sound both tight and ragged at the same time. The nearest comparison I can make would be Sulaco, and that’s probably too obscure to be useful, but suffice it to say, Quills are really not bad at all. Then again, they’ve only produced about 13 minutes of music in nearly ten years, so holding out for their world-changing full length would represent a poor investment of one’s emotional resources.
— Friar Johnsen

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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