SKULL116

EYEHATEGOD, Southern Discomfort  (2000, Century Media)

The skull:
Surrounded in a square of thorns sits the Eyehategod non-logo and a skull looking bleakly off to the left. The smudge on its forehead is like some weird Ash Wednesday rite, and it’s a simple black and white. Nothing going on here, really…about as much thought went into the album cover as the music inside.

The music:
I liked Eyehategod for about two minutes in the early ’90s. Their take on doom was novel, and you know the take I’m talking about: rancid, crusty, bluesy, sick…but after you peel away the veneer of vomit and blood you face an endless procession of generic sound-alike riffs and bullshit vocals that just add insult to injury. And maybe that’s the whole idea. Depravity and emptiness. Southern Discomfort collects various stuff from between 1993 and 1996 — split tracks, single tracks, demos. Go for it if you just can’t get enough Buzzov*en or whatever. I’ll stick to Saint Vitus and continue to have a grudging respect for the unlikely legacy these guys have created over the years.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL115

IMMENSE DECAY, From Ashes Till Remains (2011, self-released)

The skull:
The Council sees a lot of covers like this, which frame a central, large skull with some vague, abstract textures. It’s as if the band asked for just a big dumb skull, dead center, for their cover, but then saw the first draft and were beset with a nagging doubt in their creative vision. So, they sent the artist back to fill in the empty areas, and maybe could he work in a little color? It looks like this image is supposed to suggest carven stone, but I doubt any sculptor, ancient or modern, would spend the time needed to chisel the brain folds or coils of intestines that adorn the space around this otherwise handsome skull. Who knows, though. Maybe Immense Decay had it planned out all along. “Picture it: a skull in a gutpile, slathered in stucco! It’s literally gritty!” Seriously, picture it, that’d be pretty cool.

The music:
As you’d expect from a band called Immense Decay (if you’re not already singing “Angel of Death” to yourself, you’re not much of a metalhead!), this is pure Slayer worship. The production is modern, but the riffs are straight out of the King/Hannemann playbook. That said, even some random band from Poland can put out a better Slayer album than Slayer in this day and age, and if you don’t need originality in your thrash (and really, at this point, how could you?), From Ashes Till Remains might tickle your fancy. The band is tight, the songs are decent, and the vocals are acceptable. Plus, you can impress your thrash friends with the obscurity of your taste and the reach of your acquisitiveness. That alone is worth something, right?
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL114

MARTIRIO, Decadencia  (2009, demo)

The skull:
Ooooh, spooky. This skull would look utterly terrifying if it weren’t for the random baby crying for mama in the lower right portion of the artwork. Huh? Also, note the ghostly growth of a skull coming out the skull’s upper left cheek. Again I say, “Huh?” But those fangs are sharp and ready to rip. The foggy haze adds some atmosphere to this frightening/silly scene, and if that skull’s goin’ down, he’s gonna mangle a few baby heads doing it. Apparently.

The music:
If I didn’t have a band picture for reference, I’d say these guys were the sort of modern death/thrash band that takes influence from fourth generation bands like Carnal Forge. You know, Xerox copies of Xerox copies of Xerox copies until the original root is lost. It just has that stock sort of sound to it. It’s very capable stuff, musically, and the vocalist is strong if utterly interchangeable with hundreds of similar others who bark in that Anselmo-meets-Cavalera sorta way. But see, the guys are wearing Metallica and Slayer shirts, so I guess they do have a deeper understanding of thrash’s history than it sounds. Still, there’s really no reason you should seek out Martirio’s seven song demo since there’s so much more easily accessible stuff around that delivers exactly the same sort of thing. Unless you cannot get enough Carnal Forge or something.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL113

KOZELJNIK, Wrecked in Ruins of Solitude (2007, Spiritual WarArt Productions)

The skull:
A shitty low-contrast photo of a skull, washed out in a murk of very dark aquamarine. Is this skull’s solitude ruinous? It’s hard to say. He looks a little wrecked, maybe, but I think that’s more on the hands of the designer than on the solitude. Big, dumb, and ugly.

The music:
Here at Skull HQ, Friar Wagner and I generally tackle skulls on an even/odd basis. We occasionally mix it up, but generally we’re at the mercy of a skull’s divisibility by two. By pure coincidence, most of the primitive/raw/underground black metal has landed in Friar Wagner’s queue, which has worked out well considering his greater familiarity with black metal. But, with skull113, my number is up, and I’m forced to confront a release that’s pretty far outside my wheelhouse. My interest in black metal tends toward the progressive and well produced. Darkthrone enthusiasts need not knock on the door of Friar Johnsen. So, when confronted with this sort of Eastern European, tr00, kvlt, black-as-in-darkness-and-evil kind of stuff, I’m somewhat at a loss. Listening to Kozeljnik, about all I can tell you is that they sound like a lot of other bands. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell you which bands they are. This isn’t even bad stuff (well, two of the four tracks are rehearsal recordings, and one of those is a cover, and those are at a minimum unnecessary), but fuck if I can say more than that. This isn’t Darkthrone-style primitivism — there are a lot of riffs and some interesting ones at that — but there also aren’t any surprising elements on offer. The production is buzzy and raw but not confrontationally no-fi, and while the playing is rough around the edges, it’s not amateur-level sloppy. To me, this is like hundreds of other ill-defined black metal bands, and since Wrecked… came out in 2007, it’s virtually guaranteed that none of the ideas hereby presented are even remotely original. So if you want to learn more about this band from Big Dumb Skulls, you’ll just have to keep your fingers crossed that the band releases another cover with a skull, and that it lands on the even pile. So, maybe check this space in early 2015.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL112

INFERNOISE, Hellriders  (2006, self-released)

The skull:
Swear we’ve seen this picture, this very same skull before. It probably comes up near the top if you type “skull” and “images” into Google. It’s missing a few teeth and looks bored hovering there in the black, circled in yellow and thinking “this release is so obscure, no way am I going to be discovered running around with this low-rent crew.” But then he didn’t count on us skull-hunters at BDS. This is big, this is dumb…and lotsa yellow too!

The music:
This short-lived Spanish band were produced by Stratovarius guitarist Timo Tolkki at one point. The music on this mercifully short three-song EP sounds like the tossed off junk from Pantera’s final album. Or any post-Power Metal Pantera, really. Infernoise, then, is groove metal with thrash elements that has absolutely no reason to exist. The vocalist really, really wants to be Phil Anselmo too. About as much creativity went into this music as the cover idea. C’mon, people, give us something we can use here!
— Friar Wagner

SKULL111

THE ORDER, Son of Armageddon  (2006, Dockyard 1)

The skull:
Stark, but not bleak, this skull looks like the logo for a comic book from Dark Horse or Vertigo: some kind of crime story with a horror twist. It’s hard to tell because of the lack of shading, so maybe this skull is just pictured from a high angle, but I prefer to think he’s just got a very tall brainpan. The band logo is even a little clever: the cutouts in the top of the Rs are silhouettes of guys playing drums and guitar (and not just any guitar: the greatest guitar ever, the Jackson Randy Rhoads Flying V!) It could be that this skull isn’t even human; it looks a bit simian, and perhaps this son of armageggon is a damned dirty ape. But those apes evolved from people (after they blew it up) so the Council is okay with the possibility.

The music:
Crunchy, sorta old fashioned heavy metal that reminds me more than anything of Judas Priest’s Jugulator. To be fair, The Order are not that bad, but they’re based on the same bad idea: namely to take 80s style Priest and update it for the 90s with high gain amps and 40% more attitude. That this was released in the mid 00s makes the offense even more grave. I’m also reminded of some teutonic AOR bands of the past fifteen years that can’t come to grips with the fact that they’re basically making hair metal, no matter how slamming their productions. They turn the distortion up and maybe add a little double bass, but the songs are still stupid ditties about women and rockin’. Again, The Order aren’t quite as cheesy as that, but an awful lot of the riffing is heavy only in the way Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood was heavy. At their best, The Order approach recent Pretty Maids in quality, but without the same bouyant sense of fun. This is the band’s debut, and it appears that their later albums benefit from a bit more levity, even as the music becomes more rocky and less to my taste. And none of those albums feature a big dumb skull, so it really seems that it wasn’t meant to be, for me and The Order.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL110

THUNDERBOLT, Inhuman Ritual Massmurder  (2004, Agonia)

The skull:
This one is very cool. The skull looks as if it’s embedded in a layer of sedimentary cave rock, thrown down by the gods as the earth’s crust was still molten and pliable, creating the traces of motion that appear on either side of the skull. The color of dried blood on the cranium suggests this was indeed a violently rendered death, the possessor of this skull presumably dying as fast as he lived.

The music:
It’s probably unintentional, but this Polish band sounds like super-fast melodic Swede-death circa 1995 — the good stuff like Sacramentum and Dissection — taken and then satanized to an even more extreme degree,  sped up so severely that it almost runs off the tracks. Or maybe just think of a melodic Marduk. In any case, this stuff is plain old shit-your-pants intense black metal, so well done that it’s hard not to appreciate, even if a whole album of this stuff gets incredibly boring near or even before the halfway mark. They broke up one album after this one, and although I’m not sure why, I imagine it would get difficult to top what they’re doing here. And they sure give Incantation a challenge when it comes to ridiculously evil-sounding song titles: “Everlasting Infernal Puissance” and “Impious Bewitchments of Aberration.”
— Friar Wagner

SKULL109

HATCHET, Frailty of the Flesh (2006, demo)

The skull:
Angry skulls chomping on band names are always welcomed by the Council. I think it’s safe to call the weapons flanking this skully fellow “axes,” and not hatchets, but I suppose that’s to be expected when you name your band after a prosaic and utilitarian tool. You gotta do something to make it look scary. Although obviously drawn in pencil, this cover transcends the shittiness of most covers thusly produced, even if it’s also clear that the artist decided that one half of his skull looked a lot better than the other half, and then just copied and flipped the good half for both sides. That’s the kind of shoddy, half-assed work we like to see around here. The band kept up this motif at least for a while, and there’s a second, entirely different version of this image floating around: skull biting logo, backed by axes. Hatchet clearly embraces the skull in a praiseworthy manner.

The music:
Hatchet are one of the better rethrash bands working the US scene these days, better than Warbringer, but not as good as Havok (nor as good as Hexen. I would love to make a 4H joke, but I can’t think of another young thrash band that starts with H. And Hirax doesn’t count, even if everyone in that band but Katon is a kid.) Their latest album has a bit more tempo variation and melody than most of their bedenimed brethren, but this early stuff is pretty uninspired, a joyless catalog of the three or four thrash cliches upon which the entire revival is evidently built. Hatchet are actually from San Francisco, but it must be said that as of 2007, they couldn’t even stand up to the third tier of bands from the first wave of thrash in that great city. They play tightly but there are no surprises in these songs, and the drumming is mercilessly stock. There can’t be more than five different beats on this entire demo, which is maybe appropriate since every song is basically the same tempo. On the plus side, Hatchet doesn’t sing about beer or moshing. I couldn’t actually find a copy of this demo to review, but I was able to find contemporary live videos on YouTube for all these songs, and then they were also all re-recorded for the band’s proper full length debut, Awaiting Evil. I emailed the band and guitarist Julz Ramos got back to me in minutes, but he’s out on tour right now, for at least a month, and couldn’t send me a copy of the demo. Sadly, the skullection can’t wait that long, but I appreciate his cooperation!
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL108

GRAVE DESECRATOR, Cult of Warfare and Darkness  (2003, Ketzer)

The skull:
Oooh, scary ritual skull. This slightly out-of-focus picture kind of looks ancient, although the bullet belt is likely circa 1985 or so. There’s also a silver pentagram that looks like it would make a bad-ass necklace charm, and the two candles burning liven up the party. The skull? He’s all “Don’t you dare steal my evil thunder, you candlestick, pentagram and bullet belt.” Looks like he’s mounted on the candle holder, which is pretty awesome. The cover itself would be a little more awesome if it weren’t an idea that you’ve seen a zillion times before. I’m guessing that the unoriginal cover idea is going to translate to the music inside…

The music:
I couldn’t be more wrong!!! Grave Desecrator play RHCP-style pop-funk, dressed up with dubstep bass throbbing and progressive folk whimsy, while hints of skronking jazz rock serve as well-placed segues. Nah, of course it’s orthodox black metal that you’ve heard a zillion times before. If you own Sarcofago’s excellent I.N.R.I., listen to that while simultaneously listening to Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky, and you’ll basically get Grave Desecrator. Two songs, 10 minutes, which makes the plagiarism at least tolerable.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL107

TORMENTED/BOMBS OF HADES, split (2011 War Anthem)

The skull:
Designed like a slasher movie poster from the 80s, this is a very classy cover. The massive, monocular, slightly bloody skull glares evilly, no doubt irritated by the tiny cobweb affixed to his slimy peeper. He’s got no jaw, but that just leaves more room for the songtitles, without creating a need to obscure skullparts. Basically, everything about this cover works as an homage, while still succeeding brilliantly as a big dumb skull. An unmitigated triumph of BDSery! Bravo!

The music:
Tormented are more or less straight-up Earache 1990: Entombed’s Left Hand Path with a faint but present trace of Hellbastard’s Natural Order, at least on their original track here, “Repulsion Fix”. This song is less ambitious than really anything Entombed was doing back in the day, but Tormented do their work briskly and professionally and “Repulsion Fix” is a very fun tune. Their second track is a straightfoward and fairly pointless cover of Kreator’s “Tormentor”. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the first couple Kreator albums in any case, but I think the appeal is inextricably bound up in the energy and naivety that only earnest young men can deliver. Bombs of Hades are a grimier, grittier band although the basic template is still late 80s Stockholm. More Unleashed than Entombed, perhaps. I find this willful primitivism unappealing in the main, but BoH aren’t a bad band at all. Their original tune, in addition to the obvious Stockholm nods, also strongly reminds me of several songs on Sodom’s overlooked Tapping the Vein album. Maybe this is a coincidence, but if it’s not, I at least salute the band for that. They round out the split with a cover of Loud Pipe’s “Clean Your Head.” I’ve never heard of that band, but from the sounds of it, they were just some kind of D-beat band, making this cover even less essential and interesting than “Tormentor”.
— Friar Johnsen