Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

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BLACKHORNED, A Night at the Graves (2010, self-released)

The skull:
It’s well known that The Council frowns on skulls in possession of other bones, which is why skeletons are absolutely forbidden from The Skullection. But here we have an impish skull grinning madly and surrounded by bones that are clearly not a part of his own anatomy. He’s just a cheeky joker, popping out of a midden of human remains, probably to surprise some of his skull buddies, whom I imagine hovering somewhere out of frame. Or maybe this skull romps in piles of bone as a child plays in a heap of raked leaves or drifted snow. He’s just having a laugh, kicking back on a night at the graves, which is one of the few entertainment options available to a free-spirited and underemployed skull these days.

The music:
A Night at the Graves collects some rehearsal room demos and some live tracks, and was allegedly sold only at shows on CDR, although I’ve seen it listed at reasonable prices by a few mailorder vendors, so it can’t be that rare. Blackhorned play, as you’d probably expect, sleazy death/thrash with some D-beat leanings. Think Nocturnal Breed, but not as fast. I find this kind of music fairly worthless, but then again, it’s lifestyle metal, made for people who want to cultivate a very specific aesthetic and mystique. Somehow in life, a guy decides he’s gonna start wearing a black denim vest and a bullet belt and aviator glasses and spiked bracers (at least on special occasions). He decides that his music will be cult, his beer cheap, and his showers irregular. He starts off easy, maybe with some Aura Noir and Desaster and two or three bands that start with “Dis-“. And before you know it, he’s got a shrine full of Blackhorned rehearsal demos and a landlord threatening him with eviction. It happens all the time, and there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it.
— Friar Johnsen

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DISHARMONIC, Infernal Messengers (2001, demo)

The skull:
It’s hard to tell from the crappy low-res image (this cover seems to have been scanned and posted to the internet only once) but it looks like a bad screen-cap from a shitty old horror movie. Or maybe it’s just a smiling skull hanging out on some rocky European beach. His infernal message is, “Party hard!”

The music:
While the internet can offer at least a 200×200 pic of the cover, it has nothing to offer if you’re interested in the music on Infernal Messengers. I guess this is the true dream of every cult black metal band, to be so obscure that no one has ever heard you. Mission accomplished, Disharmonic! The band released a full album, evidently on CD, a couple years later, and that also hasn’t even attracted the interest of mp3 pirates. So fucking kvlt. Anyway, Disharmonic are the kind of band that wears bullet belts and bandoliers, while brandishing an axe. And of course, corpse paint. You know they weren’t gonna skip the corpse paint. But yeah, bullets and blades. It seems that if you’re going to carry a few hundred rounds of ammunition, you should perhaps forgo the axe and carry a gun. But that’s not how Disharmonic rolls. Obscure and stupid is a way of life.
— Friar Johnsen

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SOULBENDER, Soulbender (2004, Licking Lava)

The skull:
A broken up skull with horns. How original. But wait, this devil skull is also sporting a halo? A traditional signifier of holiness? Surely there must be some mistake. Surely Soulbender realizes that longstanding graphical tradition assigns horns to badness and halos to goodness. What could they possibly mean to suggest by thus combining them in a single figure? In a skull, no less! A skull floating over a generic yellow and brown background. Soulbender are totally challenging all my preconceived notions, here, forcing me to question everything I thought I knew. It’s like the very core of my being, my soul if you will, is being twisted into some new configuration, bent into… woah……………. Dude!

The music:
Soulbender are only barely metal, and at that, they’re the worst kind of metal: alt-metal. Think Alice in Chains, but slightly heavier. Like, if AiC listened to Tool but couldn’t quite figure out what they were doing. It’s Soulbender’s pedigree alone which (barely) convinced The Council of their worthiness for the Skullection, as the band includes Queensryche guitarist Michael Wilton, and My Sister’s Machine’s Nick Pollock on vocals. Granted, this is about as low-watt a supergroup as you could conceive, and they put their combined talents to even less fruitful use than most such assemblies, but if the Skullection is about anything, it’s about barely trying and hardly succeeding. Queensryche’s post DeGarmo wilderness years were marked by increasibly terrible albums, although in the recent brouhaha Wilton and company claimed to have been either disengaged from or shut out of the songwriting process altogether. But, if Soulbender is any indication, Michael Wilton was fully qualified all along to join Geoff Tate in the ruining of Queensryche. There’s not much worse than an album so calculatedly written to court commercial success as this was, but when the effort reveals an understanding of what the public wants that’s close to a decade out of date, the entire spectacle just becomes sad and embarrassing. Although, come to think of it, sadness and embarrassment is pretty much Wilton’s stock-in-trade anymore. It’s what he’s best at, even.
— Friar Johnsen

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GRÄFENSTEIN, Skull Baptism (2010, Black Hate Productions)

The skull:
They went literal here, and found a pair of hands holding a skull, as if to dunk it in a baptismal font or something, and then, I guess, they did a really bad job with the magic wand tool in Photoshop, grabbing a messy blob of the original image and plunking it on a white background. Then they made it all dark and murky and evil. Then they called it a day. Well, they did slap the band’s logo on the skull, but it’s impossible to read, so thanks for nothing, guys.

The music:
Although Gräfenstein are nominally a black metal band, 25% or more of the riffs in their songs are straight up thrash. It’s a weird combination, because for the most part they don’t blend the two styles (except for an occasional black metal barre-chord riff with a thrash beat). Instead, they just alternate between the two distantly-related modes. So while “Monarch of Scorn” starts with a barrage of thrash riffs that go on for close to a minute, it ends in a blur of black metal blasts and expectorative rasping. Both identities of the band are competent, even good, although I prefer the thrashing to the blackening, because that’s my nature. They even throw in a little neoclassical noodling in “Vermin.” All in all, this is a strange album that I can’t say I love outright, but I do find it generally appealing. The playing is sharp, the sound is abrasive but not off-putting, and the intensity is undeniable. If they’re able to better incorporate their disparate elements in the future, I could see myself really digging this band.
— Friar Johnsen

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BOMBS OF HADES, Chambers of Abominations (2010, Blood Harvest)

The skull:
It almost appears that at one point this was a much more detailed image, but it had to be repeatedly downgraded because with more detail and sharpness it just looked stupid. As it is, it still looks pretty stupid. I guess maybe you could read it as a big skull graffiti in a cathedral or something, but really it just looks like something thrown together on the library Xerox machine.

The music:
Bombs of Hades are basically working the classic Swedish death metal beat, sounding an awful lot like Nihilist or one of their demo-level peers. They’re not as sophisticated as Entombed, or as fun as Repugnant (to compare them to another clone), but they’re alright. They’ve more or less got the Sunlight sound down, and if you’ve got a hankering for yet another Stockholm style album, then this is as good as any, I suppose. After this, Bombs of Hades started to develop their own sound, mainly by stirring in some black metal and some Motorhead and dialing up the rawness in the production. I have to say, though, that I prefer their original, less original sound. Sometimes it’s best to leave the creative work to the people who are good at it.
— Friar Johnsen

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THE MASS, Towards Darkness (2004, Great White North)

The skull:
Now what do you think that snake is doing up there? Skulls, as we know, are often found levitating above cemetaries and whatnot, and of course it’s not uncommon for swords to arrange themselves behind such floating skulls. Walk through any graveyard and you’re likely to see such a scene. But then there’s this snake all wrapped around that shit, and barely holding on, to boot. What’s his game? Is he lying in wait for his prey, the unsuspecting mourners he expects to file past these crooked and ancient headstones? Or is he maybe playing a trick on some of his snake buddies? Did he call them up and say, “Yeah, dudes, meet me under the floating skull. I got something awesome to show you!” knowing full well that his serpentine pals would just slither there on their bellies, like they always do, never thinking to look up? And then when they’ve all been waiting for like 10 minutes, wondering when the fuck he’s doing to show up, BAM! He drops on them yelling “Booga booga!” and scaring the shit out them. That’d be a real fucking gas, right?

The music:
Doomy death metal or deathy doom metal, take your pick, The Mass trade in more sophisticated riffs than the fuzzed-out Sabbath-worshipping stoner doom crowd, but can’t at all compete with the paralyzing dirge of true doom death masters like Morgion. Nor do they capture the gothic solemnity inherent to the best albums from, say, My Dying Bride. No, The Mass just plays really slow. And they sometimes play with a real lack of weight, as when the single guitar switches to clean melodic lines or a lead, and all that’s left to hold down the fort is a fizzy bass and the incredibly dry drums. I suppose it’s to their credit that they don’t attempt to fill that empty space in the studio when they know they can’t bring it live (having only a single guitarist), but still, when the rhythm guitars go away, it feels like some of the band just left the room. The Mass aren’t terrible, but they are pretty dull, and while I’d take them over pretty much any band to whom the descriptor “sludgy” could be fairly applied, I’d probably just as soon listen to nothing.
— Friar Johnsen

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SIGNS OF DARKNESS, The Fall of Amen (2008, Shiver)

The skull:
It’s, like, a metaphor. The mind IS a maze, a labyrinth of thought! Except it’s, um, a really simple maze, like the kind on the back of the kids’ menu at a shitty restaurant. “Here ya go, Jimmy. Why don’t you plumb the depths of human psychology while we wait for your chicken fingers to come out. We’ll ask the server to bring you some crayons. While you’re at it, why not take a crack at the Puzzler: ‘What does a mazy skull have to do with the fall of amen?’ Huh. That’s a little weird. Well, whatever. Here are the crayons. Maybe draw a mustache on him.”

The music:
Pitched somewhere between black metal and melodic death metal (though leaning toward the former), Signs of Darkness occupy a weird grey zone. There’s no mystery to their music, nor any menace, which renders their black metal a little toothless, and they’re not quite catchy enough to be much fun as an MDM band. They don’t do anything badly, though, it’s just that tonally it’s a little hard to say what they’re shooting for. As a kind of easy-listening black metal experience they’re fine, a way to ease into the genre if you like the more abrasive elements of, say, early Dark Tranquillity, but haven’t quite come around on black metal. But then, who in that situation is going to seek out an obscure Belgian band? Why not start with Sacramentum or something like that? I feel a little bad busting on Signs of Darkness, because they’re eminently listenable and totally pro, and will appeal to people who already own a lot of music like this and enjoy the novelty of new bands, people who don’t always demand originality but require competence. I certainly own a lot of music in that vein, but not in this style, because what I have is enough. For you, maybe that’s not the case.
— Friar Johnsen

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VADER, Future of the Past (1996, Koch)

The skull:
Now THAT is an evil, scary fucking skull. It looks to be maybe a long dead bride, her veil decayed to tatters. Vader’s art is usually terrible, which makes this one all the more extraordinary. It’s a beautiful, sinister painting that’s pretty much snark-proof, and I really can’t think of anything bad to say about it. There’s a first time for everything, I guess!

The music:
I bought the first Vader album when it came out, but that was getting to the end of my “everything on Earache is awesome” phase, and the album didn’t do much for me. I would hear more Vader from time to time, particularly when I was writing the zine, but it still never grabbed me, and honestly I didn’t even know this album existed. Why they felt the need to release a full-length covers album with only two original albums under their belt is a bit of a mystery, but there you go. It’s kind of quaint how on-the-nose the list of songs is, with Sodom, Kreator, Possessed, Celtic Frost, and Terrorizer, Slayer, Dark Angel and Black Sabbath, and then a few obligatory oddities, namely tunes by Anti-Nowhere League (whom Sodom themselves also covered) and every death metal band’s favorite synthpop band, Depeche Mode. It was them or Ultravox, I guess. Today, any band making an album like this would be falling over themselves trying to out-underground everyone else, and the tracklist would be demo and single tracks from bands you never heard of. And that would be okay, because at least the covers, when they’re played this plainly and without much interpretation, might open a window to new avenues of musical exploration. But, everyone’s already heard “Outbreak of Evil” and “Silent Scream” and no one’s discovering anything new from this album. Vader’s versions of these songs are as you’d expect: more or less straight renditions, played with Vader’s usual precision, and in general a little faster. There’s something lost, though, when you play early Sodom and Kreator with too much competence, so those tracks suffer accordingly from Vader’s skill. The Depeche Mode tune (“I Feel You”) has a moany industrial vibe and is fairly bad. It was wise of the band to not follow this path any further. There’s a version of the disc with KAT cover, and it would have been cool to hear Vader paying tribute to their countrymen, but I couldn’t find that track, sadly. Anyway, for a death metal covers album, Future of the Past is pretty good. Better than a lot of Vader albums, at least, but really no more essential.
— Friar Johnsen

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RANGER, Combat Metal (2012, demo)

The skull:
Stippling is an underused technique for sure on heavy metal demos, but Ranger found some dude willing to dot the shit out of a skull for them. He’s a big-headed sort of guy, kind of a cross between that Destruction skull and Kreator’s Violent Mind (well, his skull at least). His enormous dome almost makes him look like a hydrocephalic baby vampire skull. Maybe that’s why he only has teeth on the top – he’s just teething. Too young to menace, not too old to be cute. Aw, wookit the widdle skull, with the evil wed eyes…. Goochie goochie goo!

The music:
This cassette-only demo came out late last year, and you know that any band stupid enough to release anything on cassette is also not going to be forging new ground with their music. I guess the NWOBHM and Bay Area Thrash have both been adequately rehashed, and now it’s time to redo speed metal. Whoopee. Living Death, Exciter, Razor, early Deathrow and Angel Dust, you know the drill. Ranger’s singer is of the screamy, not barky variety, and armed with that information, assuming you’ve ever heard a speed metal band before, you can pretty much imagine what you’re going to get here. I have a sort of nostalgic fondness for this sort of thing (I own both Mandator albums, for fuck’s sake) but I don’t exactly love the stuff, and I’m not especially interested in hearing more of it, but honestly, Ranger do as fine a job of recycling speed metal as, say, Havok does recycling Bay Area thrash. If you don’t know your metal history, you love rethrash, and you wish the vocalist kinda-sorta sang, then Ranger are a perfectly fine band. Break out your walkman and your denim vest, hit play and tell your parents they can shove it.
— Friar Johnsen

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SPARTAN WARRIOR, Spartan Warrior (1984, Roadrunner)

The skull:
I must say, this is a brilliant cover, and I mean that sincerely. For starters, it’s a lovely painting, executed with a skill miles beyond what 99.999999% of metal cover artists can offer. But beyond that, it’s a fantastic composition, anchored (for me) by the bird sitting on the skull. He’s pictured with his head under his wing, probably cleaning himself. It’s something birds do all the time. But, it’s something birds on album covers never do. You ask for a bird, and you’re probably going to get a majestic raven, wings spread, beak agape. Here you get some ordinary little songbird, cleaning himself atop a bleached skull. Life moves on. The skull, human life, are nothing to these birds, nothing to the world. Of no more consequence, at least, than a rock or a stump or any other convenient spot to perch and groom one’s self. All those black metal bands with their winter desolation and washed-out monochrome skulls haven’t been able to summon even a jot of the nihilism of these two little birds and their incidental meeting place.

The music:
By 1984, NWOBHM was losing its focus and some of its thrill. There were still plenty of good bands working the form, but bands in the US had taken the first few years of new wave and run with it, leaving the British latecomers to look a little stodgy and behind-the-times. Basically, as the years went on, it was harder to sound “new” and “metal” while at the same time sounding enough like the better bands of 1979 to warrant a space under the NWOBHM umbrella. One of the greatest paradoxes of NWOBHM is that it basically produced only one band that sounded like Iron Maiden: Iron Maiden. The biggest and most important band from that scene evolved so rapidly that any group that could that quickly incorporate Maiden’s innovations would no longer sound like a NWOBHM band! Now, this is of course only an issue to us in retrospect, as a matter of nomenclature, but at the same time, I think it’s no coincidence that while NWOBHM as we know it ran well into the mid 80s, success for any band was only cult-level at best. All the heroes of the movement came out of the first year or two, and after that were only weaker imitators who were never as metal as the state of the art for whatever year they came out. Spartan Warrior (to get to the nominal subject of this review) are a great example of the almost instant obsolescence of a would-be new wave band in 1984. They’re a fine band, and certainly more rehearsed and polished than a lot of the groups that came before them, but even for 1984 this music feels kind of old fashioned, as if there were still no more inputs to heavy metal than Deep Purple and Judas Priest. The riffs are too slow, the lyrics too corny. There just wasn’t room enough for two Saxons, I guess. That’s all to say that it’s clear why Spartan Warrior never broke it big, but of course they can be (or still are) pretty fun to listen to, even as they illustrate in the starkest terms how the NWOBHM, after an initial burst of creative and commercial success, produced primarily dead ends, and instantly at that.
— Friar Johnsen