SKULL392

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

BLACK BONES, Pirates of the Coast (2009, Black Blood Brigade)

The skull:
This cover is good enough to be the sign for the premier attraction in the finest of New Jersey’s boardwalk amusement parks. Taste the salty tang of adventure as you plunge more than two stories on the most piratical roller coaster you can experience for eight tickets in the peak season.

The music:
The entire BDS project is an exercise in sustained redundancy, but I nevertheless find it astonishing that I’m being called on to review another Italian pirate metal album. The last one, by Los Pirates, was actually quite good. Good enough that after reviewing it, I purchased it. I can’t say the same of Black Bones. Half the time, they’re only about as metal as a Misfits tribute band with a little more distortion on their guitars, but the other half, they’re at least as heavy as your average folk metal band. The music is rudimentary but I guess catchy enough, in the stupidest way possible. The songs are basically what you’d expect from pirate metal — singalong punk metal sea shanties — but the vocals are abysmal. Imagine Glenn Danzig doing an impression of an Italian Elvis impersonator. Go on, imagine it! But even if the singer had been awesome, this would still be a shitty album. It’s bad enough to sing about pirates; the moment you start sounding like you want people to know you’re singing about pirates, well, it’s all over.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL391

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

GHJTTATURA, Dai Su Entre (2008, demo)

The skull:
Of all the Big Dumb Skulls I’ve looked at, this has to be one of the ugliest. At least it’s not brown, and I do like the pinky ring on the severed hand (so Italian!), but really, what’s going on here? My best guess is that it comments on the fine prepositional distinction between tripping on acid and tripping into acid. Grindcore for grammarians.

The music:
This basically sounds like a Napalm Death rehearsal demo circa 2004, although to be fair, the raspy vocals would never be mistaken for those of Mr. Greenway (who also rarely sings in Sardinian, as far as I know). Grind doesn’t do much for me, and so I can’t claim to be an expert in any way, but to my untrained ears these songs sound alright. For grind, that is. I mean, they sound terrible, but they’re reasonably well written. Some of the riffs, namely the ones unaccompanied by blasting, are good. But, when the blasting sets in, lord knows what else is going on. This is partly a problem endemic to all blasting, but here the confusion is exacerbated by the garage-quality production. You’d have to be pretty hardcore for grindcore to go for this, I’ll assume, but it seems like no one who likes grind likes it casually, so maybe Ghjttatura have what it takes to go all the way. All the way to a 2:30 pm slot at Maryland Death Fest, that is.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL389

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

ILSA, The Maggots are Hungry (2009, Odium Generis Humani)

The skull:
This amazing skull combines three of my favorite things: flowing tresses, berets, and potato masher grenades. The single, glaring eye is just icing on the cake. For some reason, this skull immediately made me think of Chainsaw Caine, the idiot frontman of the godawful Slave Raider, but Caine wore his eyepatch over his right eye, so this clearly couldn’t be him. Also, Caine wishes he had hair this lovely. Really, I don’t know how or why I made the connection, but it came to me instantly and powerfully, and in this line of work, one comes to trust those instincts. Call them the providence of The Skull.

The music:
I’m not a huge fan of crust (I like Amebix and Hellbastard and not much else) but Ilsa are pretty good as crust goes. While a lot of crust leans punk, this is definitely metal, and in their slower moments Ilsa could even make for a convincing doom metal band. The raspy, grindy vocals suck pretty bad, and it’s not like any of these riffs are gonna knock your socks off, but The Maggots are Hungry is slathered in grimy atmosphere and a palpable indignation, which is really the most you can ask of crust. The production is analog and murky, but it’s not anarcho-squatter lo-fi, as a lot of this sort of thing tends to be, and clocking in at under a half-hour, this at least doesn’t leave you wanting less.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL387

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

SKULL REAPER, No Way Back (2004, demo)

The skull:
It’s not a bad painting, this one. Why a skull would be strapped to a large stone disc thusly is anyone’s guess, and there’s something about the angle of the composition that reminds me of those frilly clown collars rich dudes wore in Renaissance England, but aside from that nonsense, this is a nice enough cover. Of course, plonking the logo where they did was an act of aesthetic violence, and that logo itself looks like some free splatter font the band downloaded from some Russian site with flashing text, so it’s not like these guys are totally innocent of crimes against art, but at least their skull looks more or less anatomically correct and is posed in an original way. That’s more than we normally get around here.

The music:
Skull Reaper recorded two demos but left nary a trace on the internet. By 2004, they should have at least had some shitty Myspace page, but if they did, they deleted it (and NO ONE deletes those things; you’d be surprised how many of the demos I’ve had to review here could only be heard on the ancient, long since abandoned Myspace page of an extinct band.) Metal Archives files the band under “Death N Roll” so I’m more than a little happy to not have to endure what is surely an awful quartet of songs. One of these days, I’ll make a sidebar to list all the unheard BDS entries, so that helpful and sadistic readers can send music to us Friars, but for now, I’m going to luxuriate in yet another evening unsullied by shitty metal.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL385

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

THE GATES OF SLUMBER, The Wretch (2011, Rise Above)

The skull:
This is just a beautiful cover. An ancient skull, rotting like old wood, shrouded in shadow and cradled in leaves. The blue/green palate is mysterious, almost poisonous, and the simple scene conveys perfectly the sort of eldritch malice I think the band was hoping to evoke. If all skull covers were like this, we’d have to take the “dumb” out of Big Dumb Skulls. Fortunately for us, almost none of them are.

The music:
As regular readers of this site will know, I’m not much of a fan of Sabbath-style doom metal, but that’s exactly what The Gates of Slumber play, and I’m alright with it. I couldn’t tell you why this band is good when all those others are not. Maybe it’s because I saw them a couple times in tiny rooms and they seemed like cool dudes. Maybe it’s because a good friend of mine loves them so much that his affection has rubbed off on me. Maybe it’s because they’re obsessed with Conan and the other classics of swords-and-sorcery pulp fiction. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s their awesome cover art. While The Wretch is their best cover, for obvious reasons, most of their art is spectacular. Anyway, who cares? I don’t have to explain my random shitty taste to you! Suck it. The Wretch is the the band’s full-length (forever – they’ve recently broken up) and it’s their best, although all their albums are more or less the same mix of early Sabbath and slow trad metal. The vocals are the worst part; they’re badly doubled in that typical doom metal way, and Karl Simon’s voice wouldn’t be particularly interesting in the best possible presentation, but I’m somehow able to forgive them, or at least ignore them, long enough to just dig on the riffs and the atmosphere, which is heavy and unpretentious. It’s probably for the best these guys called it quits. They never really changed, and while they always got a little better from album to album, there’s clearly a limit to how far this sort of thing can be taken, and maybe they found it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL383

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

HAIL! HORNET, Disperse the Curse (2011, Relapse)

The skull:
This looks like an all-digital ode to Pushead, but that’s not so bad. I guess he’s chomping through a net or something, maybe a beekeepers mask. Does anyone keep hornets like bees? Probably not – why would you? But the more I think of it, the more this kind of looks like some kind of attack on an apiarist, what with the smoke in the background. I guess if you’re on team hornet, you’d probably have some kind of beef with team bee, so maybe that’s it. Send the skull over to fuck that guy’s hives up, show him who the real kings of the Apocrita suborder are. “I’m here to disperse the curse! And by curse, I mean your teeth, motherfucker” Wham!

The music:
I expected full-on Kylesa-style sludgy crap when I queued this up, and given the pedigree of Hail! Hornet’s members (Buzzoven, Weedeater, and Alabama Thunderpussy) I think I was not crazy to do so. But while the vocals are full-on supershitty, the rest of the band are actually alright, sounding kinda like something not-too-popular on Earache Records in 1992. The music splits the difference between English grindcore (the slow parts, ha ha) and Scandinavian death rock. It’s simple, but it’s well done, and the grimy but not fuzzy production is perfectly suited to it. The problem is, the songs don’t have a whole lot going on. They tend to inhabit a fairly narrow range of tempos, and man, that vocalist is really bad. He sounds like some run-down tweaker with pneumonia. I’ll give these guys credit for exceeding my dire expectations, and for easily besting the next best thing any of them has done, but I think they’ll need to improve a bit before I truly care.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL381

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

ACE OF SPADES, Ace of Spades (1994, demo)

The skull:
The odd angle of the skull and the random floating junk, combined with the green palor, immediately made me think that maybe this is some macabre jello-mold. Just out of frame to the right, there’s probably a chunk of pineapple, or a maraschino cherry. Revenge is a dish best served cold. And lime-flavored.

The music:
Although nominally thrash, Ace of Spades don’t sound obviously like any other thrash band, or really any other band that I can think of. It’s not that they have an original sound, it’s just that they seem to have just mashed together every kind of heavy-but-not-extreme style they came across in the late 80s and early 90s and called it a day. Like, 90s Loudness meets Machine Head, maybe? It’s not really good, but at the same time, it’s sort of refreshing to hear a band that’s not trying to be anything in particular. Just metal. I kinda like the singer, whose throaty, more-or-less melodic vocals kind of mix the best and worst of Japanese vocals. He has an accent, but his warbling delivery is fun nonetheless. The riffing occasionally reminds me of weak Megadeth or Annihilator, or even some reject Black Mark power metal band. I dunno. This is a weird thing. Not great, not even very good, but still weirdly endearing. The band released only this one demo, and it doesn’t appear that any of the members went on to do anything else. It’s a time capsule, this one; that’s for sure.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL379

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

FALCON, Falcon (2004, Liquid Flames)

The skull:
It’s a skull in a falcon helmet, (made to look) embossed in leather. That’s pretty awesome! The skull, however, is fairly small, and that’s not so awesome. Also, why does it look like there are stink lines coming off the falcon’s wings? I’m certainly prepared to believe that falcons are foul-smelling birds, but I don’t see why it would be necessary to artistically capture this detail in leatherwork. Also, what’s the deal with the large shadow of the helmet in the lower half of the cover? Is it supposed to look like an actual skull in an actual falcon helmet is staring at this leather, casting his shadow thereon? Maybe it’s his reflection? Ultimately, this cover raises more questions than it answers, and I am left feeling perplexed.

The music:
Falcon was formed by former Destiny’s End and Isen-Torr guitarist (and former Metal Maniacs scribe) Perry Greyson with Cirith Ungol guitarist Greg Lindstrom (playing bass here) to make old-fashioned hard rock/metal like, well, Cirith Ungol. Really early Cirith Ungol. And like Cirith Ungol, Falcon are defined primarily by horrifically bad vocals, but unlike Cirith Ungol, there’s no charm to Greyson’s tepid moaning. The music isn’t very interesting either. This sounds like the sort of band you imagine Cirith Ungol having to play shows with on the way up to the massive success they would later achieve. Every riff is a cliche, the pacing is stultifying, and that god damned singing! Basically, if you’re a mustache-and-bellbottoms heavy metal kind of guy, then maybe Falcon could be your thing. For me, this is just lazy, boring, retro junk that exists only to moisten the adult diapers of a certain kind of German. I like a lot of Greyson’s other bands, and he always seemed like a cool dude, but this band just sucks.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL377

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

BARE BONES, Defleshed (2008, self-released)

The skull:
To me, the best thing about this cover is how the font of the title is so similar to the logo of the band Defleshed. I wonder if Bare Bones even realizes they did that? They probably just subconsiously associate that typeface with the word, without questioning why. “We should call it ‘Defleshed.'” “Woah, yeah, like a bare bone man!” “Exactly.” Anyway, this is just a one color, photocopied skull, way short on teeth. It’s nice and big, unadorned and unobscured by text. I wonder if they were able to save money by using the same screen for the CD booklet and the shirt?

The music:
It seems like only yesterday, but in fact it was 290 days ago (to be exact) that I was last required to listen to this boring, entry-level Polish death metal band. Then, I was reviewing their first demo; now, I’m reviewing their second and last demo. To be brief: they didn’t get any better.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL375

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

LUCIDO, Demo 2 (2007, Inquisitoris Ex Mundus Novus Productions)

The skull:
With its stark woodcut-style design, this is actually a very sharp, cool, distinctive skull. From the chin to the nose, there’s not much to say. The lower half looks nice, and if the artist had rendered the top half in the same style, this would still be a cut above most BDSes, but it appears that the acid kicked in around the time the artist got to the eyes, and he just rolled with it. The pentagram feels a bit forced, but those massive will-o-wisp eyes are awesome, and they make the whole cover. My hat goes off to you, unknown French metal demo cover artist!

The music:
I couldn’t find any music from this demo, but I was able to track down the band’s first demo (and only other release), the equally brilliantly titled Demo 2005. It’s weird sloppy French thrash metal with some punk and black metal influences. The vocals are a kind of blackish troll growl and are quite lame. The music is shambling and disorganized, but its made with the same buffoonish charm that animates, say, Obsessed by Cruelty. Of course, no one really likes music that inept as a rule, unless they first heard it as a kid or it was made long before they listened to metal. Coming out as this did in 2005, well, it’s a little late to the party. Lucido even seem to know this, as they labor to play messy music with something closer to the basic instrumental proficiency people demand these days, but trying to have it both ways never works well in these contexts. Lord knows where they went, musically from here, but Metal Archives seems to think they ended up playing black metal. If so, well, that was about the Frenchest thing this band could have done.
— Friar Johnsen