Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

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

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

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

SKULL493

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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

SKULL491

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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

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

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

SKULL485

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NUCLEAR DEATH TERROR, Ceaseless Desolation (2008, self-released)

The skull:
I could be mistaken, but I think this is the first biohazard symbol admitted into the Skullection. At least, I can’t recall another one. Then again, for as cool as that symbol is, it has obviously been poisoned forever by bandana clad jumpmen from Brooklyn, so it’s not too surprising that most of the metal scene has steered wide of that iconography. In this case, you have to actually look pretty hard to even make it out, under the horns, spikes, sword and septagram. What, they couldn’t squeeze in a radiation symbol and a chaos star? It’s especially funny that a band called Nuclear Death Terror would opt for the biohazard symbol over the radiation symbol, but hey, these guys are anarchists and they do what they like!

The music:
This is straight-up Scandinavian d-beat, and while that’s not normally my thing, there’s something weirdly appealing about this. It sounds like Bolt Thrower doing Discharge covers, and the singer bears a more-than-slight vocal resemblance to the mighty Martin van Drunen. Sure, every song is pretty much the same, and that tiring d-beat beat dominates, but the guitar tone is sharp, the songs are intense, and at just over 10 minutes, this EP knows exactly how long it’s welcome. This is a long out of print demo CD, and while I could download the tunes from Bandcamp, I probably won’t, even though I enjoyed listening to them well enough, because I doubt this would have any staying power for me, but just the fact that this assignment wasn’t torture amounts to a ringing endorsement.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL483

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ENEMY REIGN, Means to a Dead End (2008, self-released)

The skull:
The Soviet propaganda vibe here is a welcome change of pace from the everyday here at Skull HQ, and while I think this cover is overstuffed by maybe 25%, I think the concept basically works. Cramming two sickles into the skull’s mouth does wonders for the symmetry of the piece, although I wish the artist had included a hammer somewhere. Perhaps the double sickles are meant to force the viewer into contemplating the failed agricultural policies of the Stalin period. Or maybe the artist just couldn’t find a good royalty-free stock image of a hammer. The backwards “R”s are a bit much, but I imagine its easy to fall into that sort of trap when you’re doing a genre piece like this. And I suppose the United Nations logo somewhat buried behind the skull is meant as some kind of commentary, but I’m not sure it’s really worth unpacking. It’s probably as banal as it appears. For a cover with so much going on, there’s not really a lot being said. Fitting, I guess.

The music:
This sort of squealy, semi-groovy death metal, a la Misery Index, is not my thing at all, but I will grant that Enemy Reign do the style justice, coming off a whole lot better than I expected at least. They sound downright European, which I guess is as high a compliment as most American death metal bands can ask for. The playing is super tight and the production top notch, but as with basically everything in this genre, I find the utter lack of songcraft dismally boring. Riff after riff, blast after blast, with little cohesion or unifying vision. To be sure, there are occasionally some good riffs (the ascending thing in “Isolate,” particularly tickles me, and most of “Abuse” is good) but there’s little of interest in the rhythm department, and the vocals are of course of no help at all. If Aborted or Cephalic Carnage are your thing (especially if you won’t miss the technical flourishes of the latter), then by all means look into Enemy Reign. You’ll probably like them. Me, I can do without pretty much every band that sounds like this.
— Friar Johnsen