Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

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KHROPHUS, Presages (2009, Fonomídia)

The skull:
Grimy and no doubt freshly disinterred, this is a proper grave skull. Dark background, deep shadows, not a tooth in sight: you know you’re in for some death metal. I mean, it presages you listening to some death metal. The skull’s all, “I foresee you listening to some death metal in the near future,” and you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, Nostradamus,” so he says, “Consider it presaged,” and you think, “This fucking guy…”

The music:
Like Cannibal Corpse minus (most of) the stupidity, Khrophus play meat and potatoes modern death metal without any fuss. Featuring lots of squealies, lots of minor third trills, and all the arbitrary riff changes you can stomach, Khrophus are nevertheless a fairly restrained example of the form, and that (relative) tastefulness is probably holding them back in the scene. Or not, I don’t know. Maybe all the kids these days love Khrophus. Maybe “Khrophus, Khrophus, Khrophus” is all you hear coming out of the Brazilian equivalent of Hot Topic. I can say at least that I’d rather listen to this than Krisiun, but I absolutely don’t ever want to listen to Krisiun. So: Khrophus. Better than two bands I can’t stand. Enjoy?
— Friar Johnsen

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SODOM, Obsessed by Cruelty (1986, Metal Blade)

The skull:
According to Tom Angelripper, the original concept for this cover was a skull in near total darkness, limned only by the sheen of blood running over it. That would have been a pretty awesome cover. But that is not the cover Tom got. Instead he got a wax skull with a tree growing out of the top, a couple of weird, thumbless claw hands, and some stuff that is probably supposed to be blood but which looks more like the goopy icing used to spell out messages on the tops of cakes. It’s a classic cover, to be sure, if not for the best of reasons.

The music:
This entire album was recorded twice, because the first version was deemed unreleasable. Yet, released it was (allegedly due to some kind of mix-up), and if you’re familiar with this album, you probably only know the original recording. But before you start worrying, “You mean, there’s a good sounding version of Obsessed by Cruelty out there and I’ve never heard it?” fret not. The re-recording also sounds like ass. Only the original Steamhammer LP preserves the second recording, and if you’re a fan of the album, it’s probably worth seeking out, if only for the bass solo in “Equinox”. It really must be heard to be believed. The Steamhammer version also includes the track “After the Deluge,” which was promised, but not delivered on the original version. The playing is maybe a little tighter on the second version, too, but really, this was not the work of competent musicians. After all, this is a large part of the appeal of early Sodom, or Hellhammer, or whatever other raw, cult band you can think of. They made it sound like anyone could be in a band (see also: Sex Pistols). I’m a Sodom fan from way back, but for me, the good Sodom doesn’t start until Frank Blackfire joined the band. That said, I was unfairly dismissive of this album for too long. The bad sound and atrocious playing obscured from me the (now fairly obvious) roots of the band that would make Persecution Mania. Yes, Blackfire helped a lot, but he wasn’t solely responsible for Sodom’s sudden greatness come 1986. Any decent guitarist, and any good engineer, might have steered the Sodom of Obsessed by Cruelty to the heights of Persecution Mania, as in fact the excellent live version of the title track on Mortal Way of Live demonstrates. Probably too many terrible thrash and black metal bands have been built around the idea that Obsessed by Cruelty is a great album on its own merits, but certainly the seeds of greatness were there, even if they mostly remained unsprouted.
— Friar Johnsen

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MARK EDWARDS, Code of Honor (1985, Metal Blade)

The skull:
“Warning: Drums Ahead”

The music:
It’s hard to imagine a less-essential release from 1985 than this four track instrumental EP from the drummer in Steeler. It’s not that it’s bad — it’s perfectly serviceable Shrapnel Records style shred stuff (like the filler tracks from Tony MacAlpine or Vinnie Moore) — but really, what’s the point? At least all those guitar hero albums were full of noodly solos, which hold their own appeal (I guess). It’s not like Code of Honor is a showcase for mindblowing drumming, and Edwards only claims a couple of songwriting credits, to boot. His playing is capable, maybe better than most metal dudes in 1985, but nothing more. He even ropes in another drummer (session dude Greg Bissonette) to play some ludicrously dated electronic drums on two tunes, the second being a cover of Cozy Powell’s “Dance With the Devil,” which is itself basically just a drum-centric rewrite of Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun”. Edwards would later enjoy some hairy success in Lion (and in fact, the only CD release of Code of Honor is a 2-for-1 with Lion’s debut EP), but he peaked artistically on Riot’s Thundersteel; Edward tracked four songs for that album before Bobby Jarzombek joined the band. And actually, the 3rd Stage Alert EP released in 1984 is pretty good, too. So, I suppose you could say that Mark Edwards is the Drummer King of half albums, but that’s really not saying much, is it? And of his half albums, this one is maybe the fourth best? Praise comes no fainter.
— Friar Johnsen

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THORIUM, Cast from Hell (2007, Prutten)

The skull:
A stock-photo skull (with cheesy fangs) is cheaply interwoven with an upside-down star in an image more than little suggestive of the Sisters of Mercy logo. The object of a casting is usually thrown down from its original location, so the title of this EP suggests a sub-hell heretofore unconsidered by mainstream Christian theology. Evidently it’s a black and white plane of inscrutable geometries that can be cheaply photocopied for maximum underground cred. Wicked.

The music:
Thorium is full of dudes from other bands, but the only one worth a damn was Withering Surface. They were one of the very best melodic death metal bands of all time, and I adored even in their slightly embarassing chasing-after-Soilwork groove phase. Sadly, while Withering Surface passed on, Thorium remains. Vocalist Michael Anderson was the main guy in Withering Surface, but let’s be honest: he was never a particularly noteworthy singer, and his low growls here are even less interesting than his higher-pitched rasp he used back when he was all about whorebrides and whatnot. Thorium’s music is fine, a sort of unspectacular Eurodeath that’s not exactly brutal but also isn’t making any effort to smooth over the rough patches. I rarely listen to this sort of thing because it all kind of sounds the same, but if you were into, I dunno, Vader, then maybe you’d enjoy Thorium. I’m not, so I don’t.
— Friar Johnsen

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DEATHWISH, Demon Preacher (1988, GWR)

The skull:
I’m pretty sure this guy is a distant overseas relation of the skull on all those Nuclear Assault albums. The resemblance is uncanny. Also, for a skull that’s all chained up, to a logo no less, he sure looks pleased with himself. Maybe he’s into bondage, in which case we’re probably looking at a very turned-on skull right now. Which is just how he likes it. I’ll concede that he might be a demon, but all he’s preachin’ is the joy to be found in embracing your kinks.

The music:
Most British thrash tends toward Metallica worship, and most of it is pretty mediocre. There were good UK thrash bands (Xentrix first and foremost) but the birthplace of heavy metal has a pretty poor record when it comes to this particular flavor of the stuff. When Slammer and D.A.M. are numbered among your better thrash acts, you know you’re working with a poor scene. And if Deathwish had stopped after one album (the decent but unimpressive At the Edge of Damnation), they would be held in the same low esteem as Cerebral Fix and Anihilated. But, they pressed on and managed to release the rather excellent Demon Preacher before hitting the skids. Demon Preacher, as thrash goes, is a precise, controlled affair, but it’s still fast and bursting with energy, and frontman Jon Van Doorn, with a voice that splits the difference between JD Kimball and Blackie Lawless, brings the hooks in these well written (and skillfully played) tunes. That said, there’s not actually a lot of music here. Excluding a church-bell and powerchord intro and a seemingly eternal outro that puts to use all those classical guitar lessons David Brunt’s mom made him take when he was a kid, AND leaving off the fine-but-needless cover of Black Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe,” you’re left with just over 25 minutes of thrash. That’s scant even by 80s LP standards. But, I’d rather 6 good songs than 9 shitty ones, and these six songs are indeed quite cool. Are Deathwish one of the foremost thrash bands of the 80s? Not by a long shot. But, they were pretty damned good, and Demon Preacher is well worth owning if you have any fondness for thrash at the more melodic end of the spectrum.
— Friar Johnsen

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CROWLEY, Whisper of the Evil (1986, Electric Lady Land)

The skull:
Skulls impaled on crosses are in no short supply, and indeed the most famous example of the form was also released in 1986, but this is a particularly fine specimen. The blood red brains are an obvious focal point, but it’s the worried expression that really seals the deal. “How bad does it look?” he asks, knowing that something’s not right but, perhaps in a state of shock, not able to fully grasp the magnitude of his injuries. “Oh, it’s not too bad. You look good. You’ll be feeling right as rain in no time, and hey, that star thing looks pretty cool” you mumble, as you slowly back away. “What star thing?” he asks, but you’re already gone. He’ll figure it all out soon enough, and you don’t want to be the one to break it to him.

The music:
If the only Japanese metal band you’ve ever heard is Loudness, then, well, you can still pretty much imagine what Crowley sounds like, although Crowley are more or less all metal, avoiding the cheesier hard rock tendencies of Loudness. Of course, we’re talking about pre-Thunder in the East Loudness, not the hairy stuff you might have seen on MTV (not that there’s anything wrong with that period, either.) There are some hints of Mercyful Fate black metal in Crowley, but mostly this is midtempo American-style power metal not entirely unlike early Savatage (although not nearly as good) or Lääz Rockit. The vocals, high pitched and powerful, are solid, with the understanding that this is mid 80s Japanese metal, so he vibrato is extreme and you’ll probably never figure out if Takashi Iwai is singing English or Japanese. Whisper of the Evil is a pleasant enough album, but it’s not a lost relic of total brilliance. You’re unlikely to ever come across a copy in the wild, so if you’re bored at work and want to waste 30 minutes listening to old Nippon metal on YouTube, well, you could do worse.
— Friar Johnsen

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GRAVE, Screaming from the Grave / Dreamer (1983, self-released)

The skull:
We see a lot of badly drawn skulls here at Skull HQ, but this is not one one them. No, this is one of the most awesomely drawn skulls we’ve come across. He’s weirdly deformed, as if he’s frowning so hard his entire face has started to collapse into itself, and his teeth are carved into little skulls themselves! What a badass grill! This skull is a fairly perfect encapsulation of the competing draws of heavy metal: the danger and the fun. It’s a mean-looking, angry skull, but at the same time, no one would take this guy too seriously. He’s not scaring anyone, and we love him all the more for it. I also love the many elements of the logo: the scroll, the spider web, the dripping blood, and the letters that look like carven stones in a desert. It presages Death’s peerless logo for the number of gimmicks attempted at once. Total genius.

The music:
This is not the Grave you’re thinking of, but they are Swedish. This Grave played the NWOBHM-inspired metal that was quite common in Sweden back then (and which is sometimes called FWOSHM), and they did it quite well. This self-released single contains two high energy tunes with catchy vocal lines, pretty good singing (for an early Swedish band), and some nice keyboard work (Hammond and synth). This is hardly essential stuff (and the band broke up after one more demo, leaving precious little in the way of a legacy), but if you’re into this sort of thing, Grave are surely better than a lot of the other obscure crap you listen to.
— Friar Johnsen

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BLOOD THIRSTY DEMONS, Occultum Lapidem (2009, Black Funeral Promotions)

The skull:
It’s sort of surprising that there aren’t more metal covers like this: old, morbid paintings by the masters. This work is from a series of still lifes with skulls by the Flemish Adriaen van Utrecht (died 1652), any one of which would have made a fine low-budget album cover. Set amid a key, a compass, a candlestick holder, and a book, this skull obviously seeks knowledge, and perhaps foreshadows the ultimate end of all search. Or something like that. I’m sure Blood Thirsty Demons just tore it out of a textbook, begrudgingly admitting that there’s some cool shit in this stupid art history book their stupid teacher is making them carry around all fucking day, as if they don’t have a math book and that big ass geography book to deal with, too. Anyway, despite the evident and time-tested coolness of the painting, it bears little obvious relation to the title, which means “Hidden Stone” (famously the ending of the alchemical anagram VITRIOL “Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem,” which I don’t know but assume is the referent of that Absu album title), unless we’re to assume the manuscript contains transmutational formulae. And frankly, I think I’m already giving Blood Thirsty Demons too much credit. I think someone in the band found a neat old skull painting, and a mysterious-sounding latin phrase, and just jammed them together.

The music:
I was absolutely positive I would be sitting through yet another shitty bedroom black metal project when I queued this one up, but, much to my surprise and delight, what I got instead was a kind of mediocre Megadeth knockoff with a dash of Venom, which is to say midpaced thrash played a little sloppily but with heart. Bloody Thirsty Demons are presumably grown men, but they make music like a high school band. Each song has maybe four or five riffs, repeated endlessly, seemingly because no one in the group knows better than to do that. It’s not that the riffs are bad, because some of them are actually kind of catchy and fun, but they’re hardly so good to deserve as much love as they get in these arrangements. The vocals are almost comically bad, and by that I mean they’re literally bad in a funny way, as if singer Cristian Mustaine (a name too good to be true) is trying to make us laugh. His voice is pitched somewhere between Paul Baloff and Udo, but goofier than either (which is saying something.) The production isn’t half-bad, and the playing is acceptably good, but the amateurishness of the songwriting is sufficient to put me off on Blood Thirsty Demons. At least they aren’t the atrocity I was expecting.
— Friar Johnsen

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DREAM EVIL, Gold Medal in Metal (2008, Century Media)

The skull:
Going entirely literal, Dream Evil decided to just show the god damned gold medal in metal already. Except that one can’t escape the feeling that the musical Olympics at which this particular honor was won are a decidedly low-rent affair. For starters, the medal itself isn’t even a medal, but more like a cheap brooch, or a ring they got out of some crappy kid’s toy machine at the grocery store. This “medal” is affixed not to some fancy ribbon, or even a jewelry-grade chain, but the sort of chain you’d use to padlock a gate shut. Only gold. Or photoshopped to look gold, at least. The links are nearly as large as the medal, and you can see the fucking welds! What kind of award is this? The skull itself is squished horizontally to fit inside the flowery border, his jaws agape as if screaming, “WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT?”

The music:
Dream Evil are the cheesiest of cheese, or at least the cheesiest cheese that I enjoy. Their wink-wink posturing makes it a tiny bit easier to endure their not-good-enough-for-Judas-Priest lyrics, but only barely. Really, they only get a pass for their many sins against good taste because they write unaccountably catchy tunes, and their singer is really, really good. That said, the only truly great album is the debut Dragonslayer, and some five albums in, their schtick has worn quite thin, especially as each turns the “Heavy Metal Cliches” dial up at least a notch. Gold Medal in Metal is a double disc set (some versions also include a DVD, I believe) compiling a live show and a bunch of studio rarities. As with all the Dream Evil releases, the sound and performances are top notch, owing, one assumes, to the engineering/producing magic of guitarist Fredrick Nordstrom, but really, there isn’t a compelling reason to own a Dream Evil live album. The rarities disc is better value proposition, but it’s not like their catalog is so thick with genius that there were truly excellent songs left off the albums. If you own Dragonslayer, and you want more Dream Evil, then this studio disc is pretty much as good as any others, offering the same guilty pleasures as their proper albums. If you don’t own Dragonslayer yet, or you don’t think “HammerFall from Alternate Universe where HammerFall is good” is likely to do much for you, then you can safely leave this medal unclaimed.
— Friar Johnsen

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CONFESSOR, Confessor (1992 Earache)

The skull:
Impeccably simple: a boxed-out side view of a skull, stippled white on black, topped with the band’s beautiful looping logo in a two tone fade. It’s nearly perfect, this cover, and while The Council always and forever prefers a face-forward rendering of a skull, the artistry of this Confessor EP is so great that even our hooded masters welcome it unreservedly into the Skullection, without the usual grudging complaints that a skull from the side is better than no skull at all (or, even worse, two skulls).

The music:
No other band ever sounded like Confessor, and their self-applied label of “technical doom metal” is perfectly apt. Spastic drumming over odd-time perversions of Sabbath riffs are the basis for the Confessor sound, added to which Scott Jeffries piercingly high vocals create a sound unlike any other. Confessor are the sort of band where if you like all their influences, there is still no guarantee you’ll appreciate the final product. Take Trouble, for instance, who were so influential on this North Carolingian band that this three song EP contains TWO Trouble covers. While the guitars are played fairly straight on both, Jeffries replaces Eric Wagner’s smoky rasp with his shrieking, warbling highs (on the non-instrumental “The Last Judgement”), while Steve Shelton adds a burbling undercurrent of off-kilter triplets to the drum beats. The results, while still fairly faithful to the originals, are still undeniably Confessor, such that if you ONLY knew that band, you’d probably never guess these were not original songs. The third track on the EP is the pinnacle achievement of the band’s full length debut, the brilliantly twisted “Condemned”. In their original formation, the band released that album and this EP and then broke up, making this an essential piece, but the band regrouped in the mid 00s and released another EP and album, although neither attain the same heights as their original 90s releases. They’re still kicking around as a live unit, and it’s hoped by many that they’ll make it back to the studio to keep their unique brand of doom alive.
— Friar Johnsen