Tag Archives: barely trying

SKULL627

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BONE SICKNESS, Bone Sickness (2010, demo)

The skull:
There isn’t much to say about this skull except to note that the sickness in question seems to cause cracking and fissures in an infected skull. A tough break, for sure. What most tickles me about this cover is the efficiency with which they reused the N and E in their logo. No sense wasting the ink on two Ns and two Es, when one each will suffice. Clearly these anarcho-punks are of the enviro- sort. If only they could have found a way to cut down on the Ss.

The music:
This here’s some rehearsal room d-beat death metal that sounds like someone trying to reverse engineer Amebix from the first Bolt Thrower album. As crusty stuff goes, it’s very well written, but it’s hard to listen to anything so shitty sounding. Hard for me, at least — this demo has been reissued twice, on cassette and 7″ vinyl, so I guess the fidelity is sufficiently high for at least a few hundred die-hards. Do you think Hellbastard sold out when they released a full length album? Do you own at least five bands that start with Dis-? Have you ever stencilled anything in white out on your leather jacket? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you need this shit. Like, right away!
— Friar Johnsen

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THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, The Year Of Our Lord (2002, Willowtip)

The skull:
This looks like the homemade invitation to someone’s Halloween party. Someone who takes Halloween entirely too seriously, but is also not very good at it. You know the type. Like, sure, winged skulls can be pretty scary, but this winged skull is not, and while I’m sure the card-making program made it easy to wrap the whole thing in those borders, were they really a good idea? And what the fuck does any of this have to do with The Year Of Our Lord? Unless your lord is Charlie, nothing.

The music:
With a cover like this, I fully expected some kind of biker doom, but The Year Of Our Lord are a pretty decent melodic death metal band. It was only after I started listening to them that I noticed they were on Willowtip, a label that is very unlikely to have ever signed a sludge band or whatever. Anyway, this is specifically that kind of melodic death metal where you’d expect to hear a violin (or a synthesized simulation thereof) and the lyrics are about windswept moors and other other mopey, romantic shit. Romantic like Lord Byron, not Jackie Collins. Now, I love a clubfooted playboy as much as the next guy, but that’s not really my scene. If you like your MDM brooding and gothic, however, this band is WAY better than their art would suggest, and you’d probably enjoy them.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL582

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CLAIRVOYANT, Curse of the Golden Skull (2011, self-released)

The skull:
Seriously? What’s the title of the album? Curse of the White Skull? Is that it? No? Then print the fucking thing in yellow or something! I’m not asking for gold leaf on a self-released CD, but for fuck’s sake, is a little title/image congruity too much to ask for? Unless… maybe the curse of the golden skull is color blindness? Woah.

The music:
I’m not gonna lie: I didn’t expect much from this. I mean, look at it! This has “shitty demo” written all over it. But, it’s a reasonably good slab of Running Wild style power metal. It might even be about pirates, but I don’t really care to examine the lyrics so closely as to find out. It’s a bit rough around the edges, as you might expect, and as cheesy as any Running Wild inspired band has to be, but the music is about 10000000x more professional than the cover art. The singer reminds me a little of Stefan Schmidt, of Jester’s Funeral and Heavatar (and one other band I won’t mention), doing his euro Hetfield thing. He’s got enough range to deliver catchy melodies, and not much more, but he works well with what he has, and fits well with the rigging. The rest of the band have their shit together, too, and the guitarists in particular play well together. After releasing this album, the band changed names to the even worse Wölfrider, but they’ve yet to follow this with another full length. Still, good new power metal is thin on the ground these days, so while you wait for the next Solar Fragment disc, maybe these Poles are worth checking out.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL541

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SCAVANGER, Scavanger (2005, demo)

The skull:
I bet there’s another band out there called Scavenger whose album cover is this exact, blurry, angry, red skull, and when this band stole it, they changed the spelling of the band name to Scavanger (note the extra A) to avoid being caught. So far, they’ve gotten away with it, but how long can they keep running?

The music:
I imagine there are thousands of bands like this in Germany. Basically competent, totally boring trad metal bands knocking out chintsy-sounding demos in their bedrooms. They’re the first of four local openers tacked onto the UDO show. They play Sunday nights at their local bar, to a crowd they know personally to a man (and woman, since the bassist’s mom usually goes to their gigs.) They’re not horrible, but even on the ranked list of “Bands Who Aren’t Horrible,” they fall somewhere in the high 6000s. Weirdly, two of the three songs on their Reverbnation page are from this demo, even though they’ve released two albums since. I’m not about to look further into their discography, but that’s a bad sign right there, as these old tunes (the 2005 demo is their first recording) are not so hot. The newer track sounds more or less the same, although I think those drums are real. Back in the 90s, when I was writing a zine, if I got a demo like this from an American band, I might have ginned up some enthusiasm for them, as they’re at least melodic and more or less able to play, but in 2005? In 2014? Not a chance. AND they’re from Germany, where the bar for this sort of thing really should be higher.
— Friar Johnsen

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AS I LAY DYING, Decas (2011, Metal Blade)

The skull:
I bet the young metalheads fresh out of art school feel like they’ve landed the perfect job when they’re hired into the design department at Metal Blade Records. And maybe one of them, on learning that he would be doing the cover for As I Lay Dying’s latest release, pitched some elaborate collage piece inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron before Brian Slagel came in and swatted the stylus out of his Cintas hand and yelled, “What are you fucking talking about, nerd? This is just some bullshit compilation, and we’re already losing like 24 cents per on mechanicals. Pull a fucking skull from the junk box, photocopy it a couple dozen times, and put the fucking title on it. This isn’t the god damned Louvre and you ain’t Andy shitloving Warhol. And don’t EVEN come back asking to expense some fucking font. Go to one of those Russian sites and get one for free and quit bothering the grown ups! Jesus, don’t they teach you idiots anything in school, or do you spend all day drawing your mommies with crayons?”

The music:
Remember how, the last time I discussed As I Lay Dying, I said, ” I can also kind of appreciate in retrospect is the looseness of the entire album; the drums are clearly not quantized or triggered, and Lambesis had to more or less get his shit in tune before the mass adoption of Autotune, which lends the entire affair an almost organic feel”? Well, in the 8 years separating that album from this one, the band ceded 100% of that organic feel. The clean vocals are mercilessly tuned (“From Shapeless To Breakable” is a master class in unnatural autotuning), the drums sampled and time-aligned, and all the tones compressed into a narrow band centered on the chug note of whatever their low string is. Which is just to say, there is literally no way to tell As I Lay Dying from the thousands of other metalcore bands that labored night and day to completely ruin metal in the aughts. This disc is not an all new collection of tunes, though: it’s a contract-fulfilling way for the band to cut loose and show us how oldschool and really metal they are, by covering past-their-prime Slayer tunes (“War Ensemble”), done-to-death Judas Priest tunes (“Hellion/Electic Eye”) and the obligatory “check out how how diverse and cool our tastes are” tunes (“Coffee Mug,” by Descendents). Also: a dubstep remix. For fucking real. This is the perfect music for a cover so haphazardly thrown together, the ultimate expression of “pointless.”
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL179

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PYLON, Days of Sorrow (2006, Quam Libet)

The skull:
I’m assuming that the hapless designer who put this cover together thought that just converting everything to grayscale would make it look like this randomly pasted skull would appear to be an integral piece of the rococo architectural detail that serves as the background, but nope, it didn’t work out like he’d planned. To boot, the skull is considerably smaller than it could/should have been. A shoddy effort all around.

The music:
Yet another brainless, talentless Sabbath knockoff, fronted by a completely worthless singer. Musically, I like that they sometimes follow their idols down the softer, psychedelic paths that most fuzzed-out Sabs imitators forgo, but man, it’s really hard to endure this shit when the vocals come in (although the heavy German accent is at least a little funny). Days of Sorrow is just three songs on a split with some other no doubt awful band called Painwork, but until they come up with a Big Dumb Skull of their own, I’m not going near them.
— Friar Johnsen

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RITUAL SPIRIT, Ritual Spirit (2001, Shark)

The skull:
Lazy, ugly, and brown even by the depraved standards of Big Dumb Skulls, this is one of the saddest covers I’ve ever seen. What band could care so little about their art, what label be so unconcerned with success, to have settled on this image? It’s like a suicide note, this cover, anhedonia expressed through Photoshop. “We feel nothing. The world is without meaning. No one knows anyone, and we all die alone. Signed, Ritual Spirit.”

The music:
Unbelievably, indeed depressingly, I was not able to find even a single song by this band online. Shark Records released a lot of crap to be sure, but they were a big enough label that you’d think someone would have bought, liked, and memorialized it to YouTube, especially since the band was founded by some ex-member of Tyran Pace (known best as Ralf Scheeper’s first band). Almost every big dumb skull has left some musical mark on the internet, down to the most obscure and ephemeral artifacts of three decades past. Ritual Spirit, though, exists only as a collective dream, a half-remembered hallucination of middling power metal. Oblivion awaits us all, and one day the last person to have heard even Metallica will pass from this earth.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL142

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SKULLFATHER, Order of the Skull (2008, self-released)

The skull:
A garden variety skull photo, limned in red, and framed by a terribly ugly and distorted, tattoo-parlor olde English typeface for the logo and title. What else is there to say? The Council does commend Skullfather for the singularity of their commitment to the skull. It’s in their name, their demo title, and on the cover. A trifecta! But, we’ve seen some variation on this cover several times since Big Dumb Skulls was launched, and we’re hardly one-fifth of the way through all the skulls collected by The Council. It’s gonna be a long couple of years, I think.

The music:
One man, bedroom Entombed worship. And not even the good stuff, but the watered-down, post-death rock throwback stuff from the mid 00s. Then again, maybe Skullfather isn’t an Entombed clone, but a Desultory clone. Double meaning! Allx (sic), the presumed Skullfather, does a pretty good job emulating the Sunlight Studios guitar tone, but his songs are boring, his vocals unimpressive, and his drum programming pedestrian. I guess even Allx was bored with this shit, because he only produced these four songs before his one man band broke up. I won’t miss them.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL118

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W.A.S.P., Best of the Best (2000, Snapper)

The skull:
While I guess it took a little while to clip together the background collage of old W.A.S.P. albums and royalty-free saw blades, the final product here is still a triumph of laziness and grim boredom. The enormous skull seems to have no greater raison d’être than to provide a whitish background so the logo stands out better, but if nothing else, it would be difficult to fit more skull on this cover. Of course, plopping a translucent skull over a red background means most of your cover will be pink, but hey, we don’t judge here.

The music:
While W.A.S.P. has released about three dozen greatest hits compilations, the definitive, nay quintessential W.A.S.P. best-of is their self-titled debut, which contains about 85% of all the good songs they ever recorded, a fact obviously not lost on the hard working folks at Snapper Records, who saw fit to dedicate a full third of the tracklist on Best of the Best to songs from that album or the band’s debut single. Bear in mind that W.A.S.P. had released eight albums by the time this compilation was issued, two of which are entirely unrepresented here. But while you won’t be hearing any songs from Still Not Black Enough or Kill Fuck Die on Best of the Best, you’ll get two tracks from Helldorado, the band’s worst album (as of 2000), including the flabbergasting “Dirty Balls.” And really, if “9.5.-N.A.S.T.Y.” is to be counted among the best of the best, I shudder to imagine what even the worst of the best would be. Die-hard W.A.S.P. fans will of course want this for the two exclusive songs, including the all-time second best heavy metal cover of Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” The best never sounded so bad.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL116

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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