Category Archives: Skull

Skull of the day

SKULL95

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BLITZSPEER, Live (1990, Epic)

The skull:
Finally! Some actual Pushead, to go along with all the pushead knockoffs littering the skullection. This is hardly Mr. Head’s finest work, but it’s still pretty excellent in its simplicity. Skull, eyepatch, crossbones, checkered flags. Looks like the painting was then slapped unceremoniously over a photo of some asphalt, but half-assedness was the order of the day, as we shall see.

The music:
In the late 80s, there was a halo effect around hair metal, the aquanet tide lifting all ships in the metal fleet. Thrash, in particular, seemed like it might be the next big thing, and every major label scrambled to sign any band that might possibly become the next Metallica, or, failing that, the next Testament. A lot of bands without so much as a demo got snapped up and rushed to market well before their due, and as a result you’d see things like Meliah Rage’s Live Kill Blitzspeer’s Live taking up space and creating “buzz” while the bands got their shit together for a full length. As it happened, by the time those LPs were finally shit out, so too had Nevermind been shat, and the thrash Titanic made a beeline for the ocean floor. A lot of great bands undeservedly took it on the chin in those dark times (see: Wrathchild America), but it can’t be said that Blitzspeer didn’t deserve their almost immediate obscurity. A tepid mix of thrash and biker rock, delivered with a well-rehearsed NYC punk sneer, Blitzspeer weren’t bad so much as totally, completely forgettable. Live is actually a really nicely recorded document, and while at least half of these songs appeared on the band’s studio debut (and swansong) Saves, these live versions are clearly more energetic than their properly tracked counterparts. That’s not enough to really make it worth your time to track this stuff down, but I guess if you’re dead set on owning some Blitzspeer, this is the one you want.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL94

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ZARACH BAAL THARAGH, Skull Face Exhumations  (demo, 2006)

The skull:
This French freakazoid has shown lots of love for big dumb skulls throughout his illustrious, infamous career, between this “band” and other projects like White Bastard and Skull Face. We spun the wheel and chose this one. It’s as good as any. This one boasts some real black metal chutzpah: pentagram, crazy logo, lots of dripping stuff, what appears to be a forest, and a very worried looking skull. Party! This skull is likely overwhelmed with the grief of appearing on one of this guy’s 100+ demos. It’s embarrassing stuff for any skull. No kidding, this guy has over 100 demos to his credit. What’s weird is he’s not produced any yet for 2013, as of this writing in late March. Is he still alive?

The music:
Typical one-man-band/bedroom-studio sort of stuff. That doesn’t always mean garbage, but it does here. There’s a fine line between something like this and Xasthur. This particular demo (ZBT’s 49th, apparently) features 22 different tracks all named “Exhumation.” Surely some folks have tried to convince themselves that this exists on some high-art level, but I know pointless black metal junk when I hear it, and this is the epitome of pointless black metal junk. Moving right along…
— Friar Wagner

 

SKULL93

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TASTE OF BLOOD, Skull of Vaccuum / Survive the Rain (2006, self-released)

The skull:
He’s comin’ atcha, this skull, so fast that he’s starting to blur. So fast that you couldn’t snap off a pic before he’d pretty much filled the entire frame. You’re gonna taste the blood, all right, when this guy headbutts you. I guess you might taste some logo, too. Chew that gingerly – it looks sharp.

The music:
In ’99 or so, you couldn’t spit at a label roster without hitting a band like this, just a straight-up In Flames / Dark Tranquillity knockoff (for another German example, see: Night In Gales). They were everywhere, these bands, and because they were playing an inherently inoffensive and palatable style (sugary melodic death metal), none of them were really bad, but you could count on these acts going in one ear and out the other. By 2006, when this single (!) came out, pretty much all the melodic death metal bands in the traditional Gothenburg mold had vanished, supplanted by their sadder, degenerate ancestors, the Killswitch Engage clones and their mopey ‘core brethren. I’ll admit, I’d take Taste of Blood any day over that shit, but that’s really putting the “lesser” in “lesser of two evils.”
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL92

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PENDULUM, Skull Fuck  (1989, Euthanasia)

The skull:
Oh my. This is one of the greatest skulls we have ever curated in the Big Dumb Skullection. While we disqualify any cover featuring multiple skulls, this one skirts around that rule by featuring a skull that is simply made of smaller skulls…it’s just part of its genetic makeup, it can’t help it. And it’s in grave danger of losing all those little skulls, with that half-moon blade swinging pendulum-style right into the skull’s forehead, spraying blood and tiny skulls everywhere. And the skull looks immensely happy about this! Perhaps the blade is firing neurons in the skull-brain that produce a feeling of total elation or something. Two hooded figures flank the scene, looking on as if this was some sort of medieval sporting event. We believe these two are ancestors of a couple members of the Council of the Skull. This cover is almost too good to be believed.

The music:
This long-dead Texas band are aiming for a kind of wiry, buzzing technical speed metal sort of thing, probably influenced in part by fellow Texans Watchtower, who were in their prime the year Pendulum released this 4-song EP. It’s interesting music, possibly fusion-influenced, but the vocals are horrible. The vocalist is what your mom means when she says “How can you listen to all that yelling?” And this guy isn’t even doing a threatening sort of yell; he sounds like a petulant child who just discovered D.R.I. and is trying his best to whine like Kurt Brecht but ends up sounding like an entirely powerless and way less squeaky Jason McMaster (ex-Watchtower).  You have to admire Pendulum’s forward-thinking approach, but the vocals kill it, and the arrangements are a total mess too, so unless later demos are better, it would seem their finest contribution to metal is that amazing cover artwork.
— Friar Wagner

 

SKULL91

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Enemy of the Sun, Caedium (2010, Massacre)

The skull:
This overly smooth skull (grimy textures notwithstanding) was obviously produced with some kind of 3D modelling software, but probably not by the guy who designed the cover, because the sun-insignia set into the skull’s dome is clearly just a slapped-on photoshop addition and not a part of the wireframe model. You can see that it doesn’t follow the contour of the pate at all. Lazy! Same goes for the very cheap-looking effect of the bullet exploding out of the right temple. It seems like this was added rather haphazardly after someone in the band asked, “Yeah, but what does this have to do with caedium?” at which point the artist looked it up and found it meant, more or less, “murder” in Latin. “How’s about, like, I add a bullet coming out of his brain?” Sold!

The music:
Enemy of the Sun is the latest project from guitarist and producer par excellence Waldemar Sorychta, following Grip, Inc. and Despair (among other lesser acts). Sorychta’s guitar style is as distinctive as his production, which makes it very hard to compare him to anyone else. No one else really makes music in the style he does, either, which is thrashy, but not thrash, and decidedly not death metal. He offers a speculative take on what thrash might have become had it evolved consistently in the decades after it’s early 90s commercial and creative death. That said, there’s a blanket of sameness draped over most of what the man has done since Despair that makes it hard to form a strong connection with it. In Grip, there were Lombardo’s drumming and Gus Chamber’s furious yelling to compensate, but none of the other players in Enemy of the Sun rise above the baseline set by the leader (although I do appreciate the diversity of tones employed by frontman Jules Näveri). On Caedium, you get solid, competent, reliable, and ultimately kind of samey songs that work well enough on their own but fail to meaningfully cohere into an album. There’s nothing at all that’s bad about this album or the band, and I’ll definitely check out anything new they produce, but I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL90

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NECROPSYA, Skullcrusher  (2006, self-released EP)

The skull: As with the good Friar Johnsen’s complaints regarding the lack of crushing going on with skull81 (a band named Skullcrusher), this cover also promises skull crushing without actually delivering it. As is, this cover is absolutely great. The skull looks quite happy for what is about to happen to him, which seems to be more of a drilling than a crushing. While it seems measures have been taken to either prevent a crushing, or repairs were made from a previous crushing attempt (the bolted-on metal plates), both are moot points: this skull’s about to get a lower parietal trepanation on the left and right side, and real quick, dawg. We’ll have to wait even longer to get a truly skullcrushed skull added to the Skullection. For now, this beauty will do just fine.

The music:
This is one Brazilian thrash/death type band that Nuclear War Now! will probably NOT be reissuing on vinyl anytime soon. It’s lame, pedestrian, boring, and without any reason to exist whatsoever. They’ve self-released two full-length albums since, and I hope there’s some measure of improvement on those. How to describe this level of lameness? Maybe the most generic of early ’90s British thrash,  with an attempt at death metal in the vocals, but these are un-threatening, non-guttural, and unconvincing in their delivery. Tame and utterly fourth rate. I guarantee that if Wild Rags Records was around in 2013, they’d be the only label to consider signing them (there were a handful of good albums that came out on W.R., but you know what I mean). I’ll bet the newly-revived Pavement label and its A&R genius is gonna be all over Brazil’s Necropsya any day now…
— Friar Wagner

 

 

SKULL89

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SACRIFICE, Crest of Black (1986, demo)

The skull:
Even by the standards of the hand-drawn demo cover, this skull is pretty lame. Why does a skull with no eyes need an eyepatch? Why not wear two, then? The pentagram is of course always a welcome addition, and it’s nice that instead of the cliched knife in the teeth, this pirate skull is biting down on a big axe, it’s notched blade glinting in the sun. How he’s going to wield it is another question for another time.

The music:
Early Japanese thrash that’s pretty much exactly as good as you’re imagining. It’s easy to forget when you hear something this murky and terrible that in 1986, thrash was actually pretty advanced. It’s the year of Reign in Blood, Peace Sells, and Master of Puppets, but you’d think from listening to Crest of Black that Hellhammer’s first demo had just been released, that Mantas was still in Venom, and that Quorthon was still squatting over pentagrams. This demo sounds terrible, the songs are awful, and the playing and singing are atrocious. I know there’s a whole scene of people for whom this kind of “authenticity” trumps all other concerns (and it is for exactly this undiscerning crowd that this barely-a-footnote demo was bootlegged on vinyl), but I for one demand a bit more than an unusual (for metal) provenance and a yellowing photocopied tape sleeve. Don’t hear small sound indeed!
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL88

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COME SLEEP, The Skull of Ahab  (2004, demo)

The skull:
Man, just when you think you’ve seen the simplest of simple skull album covers, here comes Come Sleep. I very much doubt this is the skull of Ahab, unless he was of the Homo Habilis species, and somehow I think the dude was younger than 1.4 million years old. But hey, Come Sleep have provided artwork that’s beautiful in its simplicity, with the understated band non-logo tattooed across the skull’s left eye. What a hipster.

The music:
This Swedish band rank at about a 5 on the Sludge Boredom Scale. It’s not the boring-est sludge ever, as it has various layers and textures that keep it just a little bit colorful, and some of the vocals are actually emotive in a way that ape-thug shouts can never be. You can tell they’ve studied the requisite Neurosis and Mastodon albums, but ultimately this five-songer does indeed beckon me to slumber. It’s just not my thing, but if you like sludge, there’s lots worse out there, and the band’s obscurity is not quite deserved.
— Friar Wagner

 

SKULL87

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BARE BONES, Refreshing Old Skull (2008, demo)

The skull:
Old, I’ll grant. A skull? Yes. Refreshing? I’m not sure about that. I suppose it’s refreshing for a band to just own up to the ridiculousness of their BDSery in this way. I mean, the band is Bare Bones. The demo is Refreshing Old Skull. Surely that’s a sign of some self-awareness, right? Right?

The music:
Although it’s rarely a genuine pleasure to suffer through these obscure releases for Big Dumb Skulls, there’s something satisfying about peering into an otherwise untouched and unloved pocket of the scene. This Polish band released two demos in the late 00s and then broke up. Came and went, with no one the wiser for it. Listening to Refreshing Old Skull, it’s pretty obvious why: Bare Bones were a boring midpaced thrash band with crappy death vocals and their demo sounds like the work of a couple weekends in the guitarist’s bedroom. Cheap sounds, bad programmed drums, and dull songs are the order of the day. But whatever – these guys were probably teenagers when they made this. Bare Bones are no worse than the metal bands I palled around with in middle school. Okay, maybe a little worse.
— Friar Johnsen