Tag Archives: brown

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CHAINSAW, Permanent Menace (2011, Metalizer)

The skull:
This skull is so fucking tough his lower jaw is a god damned chainsaw! Sure, the background is ghastly and the Photoshop work is abysmal (the horns and the handle of the saw seem to occupy the same space, for instance) but I’m gonna let that all slide, because this artist wasn’t ‘shopping in a snake or some fire – he was ‘shopping in a motherfucking chainsaw. It’s utterly ridiculous, and also implausibly original, as we’ve never seen anything like this here at Skull HQ, which is a higher and higher bar to clear every day. Well played, Chainsaw art dude. Well played.

The music:
I expected bad Russian rethrash, but this is in fact some proper oldschool German thrash. Chainsaw were active in the 80s and released one full length before disbanding, but this disc is apparently an unreleased second album. Maybe these were just demos, but they sound good enough to have been final recordings for an album meant to come out in 1989, although I suspect the source for this was an old cassette of a rough mix or something, as the quality from track to track is not totally consistent. The music is fast and tight, sounding like a cross between Blackfire-era Sodom and Testament, which is a combination I wouldn’t have imagined before but works quite well. It’s neither technical nor barbaric, but something in between, and there’s no denying this was made in the 80s. I like it! This is one of the better lost thrash albums I’ve heard, and it makes me curious about the band’s earlier work, which features awesome cover art of a totally different sort, the kind of drawing that would make Vortex proud.
— Friar Johnsen

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AFTER EARTH, Ruin (2012, self-released)

The skull:
You probably think it’s just perspective that makes the skull loom so large in the frame, but no, this is a giant wrecking skull and it just knocked down that building. Who knew the Morlocks were such an ornamental people, and that their flair for embellished design would extend even to their heavy construction equipment?

The music:
Remember back in 1997 or so when pretty much every death metal outfit was trying to sound like Dark Tranquillity and/or In Flames? Those were the good ol’ days, at least for After Earth, who were sadly too young to have ripped off the Gothenburg bands when it was still fashionable to do so. But they’re here now, and if you miss those halcyon times when Night In Gales and Gardenian rode high on the hog, you can party with After Earth like it’ll be 1999 in a year or two.
— Friar Johnsen

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RIVERGE, Rebirth of Skull (2009, Rock Stakk)

The skull:
This has to be the worst reincarnation ever: reborn as a cheap-ass Giger knockoff, a crappy biomechanical skull poked full of ugly dripping tubes. At least he’s a little scary-looking, maybe. I wonder what this guy was in his previous life? Probably an accountant or something. An evil accountant.

The music:
This is medium-sloppy Japanese thrash that generally fails to impress. It almost has the feel of crossover, but there really isn’t any hardcore in Riverge’s sound – it’s almost like they took their Leeway and Crumbsuckers albums and excised the NY hardcore, leaving only hyperactive caveman thrash. The singer sounds like a Japanese Tom Araya, but not young and awesome Tom. Instead, the Riverge dude sounds like late 00s Tom, a yelling, greying gorilla, now with a thick Japanese accent. That said, Riverge are not exactly a Johnny-come-lately thrash act; they have existed in some form or another since the mid 80s, and some of the songs on Rebirth of Skull, their first actual album, date from the band’s earliest days. Japanese thrash generally doesn’t do much for me, and that’s more or less the case here, although I’ll admit that overall, Riverge are better than most of the other Japanese thrash I’ve heard, and in fact a bit better (if only barely) than most of the rethrash I encounter. Their newer album sounds a bit better, so that’s probably a better starting point for those interested in Riverge, but you’d have to be a pretty serious thrash maniac to bother.
— Friar Johnsen

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KAOS, Kaos Among Us (2003, Oblivion Entertainment)

The skull:
Fashioning a chaos symbol out of swords was an inspired idea, and of course cramming them through a skull was the right thing to do. I like the bonus spiky flails as well; they have no business being there, and that’s what makes them work. But I could have done without the generic background of brown and fire. The whole thing looks like an ad for a Games Workshop product, and though that was pretty cool when Bolt Thrower did it in 1989, whatever metal cred being able to field a 3000 point Chaos Space Marine army might have once established, now you just look like some video game dweeb when you lay on the grimdark too thick.

The music:
When I first started spinning this, I thought it was pretty good modern rethrash, if a bit heavy on the crossover elements. I mean, it’s not awesome, and it’s not original by any stretch, but it’s got the fire and energy of a band who at least believe they’re doing more than recreating the sound of a scene they were too young to have experienced firsthand. But then I looked up the release date and saw that this came out long, long before the current trend for mosh exhumation, and it all started to make sense. In fact, Kaos started turning out demos in 1988, making them an honest-to-god first wave thrash band, even if it took them until the year 2000 to release a proper album. Imagine if Sadus started drifting toward hardcore after Swallowed In Black, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Kaos sounded like circa 2003. Not too shabby! Unlike 99.999% of today’s young thrashers, Kaos obviously have more inspiring source material in their record collections than Exodus, Slayer, and Ride the Lightning. The vocals are like a blown-out holler, none too pleasing, and no one is going to accuse Kaos of breaking new ground on their riffing, but this album was clearly made by lifers who knew what they were doing. As I get older and more jaded, I more on more rely on these gut-level inferences about a band’s intentions, which I know is not rational, but whatever. Kaos aren’t awesome, but better them than Toxik Holocaust.
— Friar Johnsen

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MERCYLESS, Mundo Enfermo (2012, KTC Domestic Productions)

The skull:
Seriously, how many album covers are just skulls photoshopped into brown, crumbling, plaster walls? Half of them? More? Mercyless clearly recognize that they’re working with a threadbare motif, which is why they added the clown wig. At least, that’s how I’m choosing to interpret the weird corona around the skull. Mundo Enfermo translates to Sick World, and as Patch Adams taught us, laughter (plus clown paraphernalia) is the best medicine.

The music:
Mercyless are basically the Spanish equivalent of Hatebreed, which is to say, they’re a hardcore band that also likes Slayer, but only kinda. They like the fast parts with the double bass and the riffs that are mainly just 16th notes on the open low string, but the tricky riffs or anything played on the skinny strings, they don’t care for. Lyrically, Mercyless are riled up like a political grindcore band, at least as far as I can tell with my limited Spanish, but they have a video that’s basically all footage of riots and burning police cars, and that’s alright. This is not something I ever need to hear again, but if you love Biohazard, hate the ECB, and speak Spanish, then this might be your jam.
— Friar Johnsen

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THUNDERSTONE, Dirt Metal (2009, Sony)

The skull:
This skull has it all, and when I say, “all,” I mean “all the shit that drives me crazy.” It’s crammed full of gears, tubes, and other cheap biomechanical nonsense, and it’s completely brown but somehow not with dirt, which might have actually justified the brownness vis-a-vis the album title. Like the music within, this cover is totally competent, probably expensive, and thoroughly uninteresting, the kind of pointlessness only Scandinavian-branch-of-a-major-label money can buy.

The music:
Thunderstone started as a cheap Stratovarius clone, but over the course of a handful of albums they’ve evolved into a cheap Symphony X clone (minus any trace of that band’s progressive leanings). They’re a perfectly fine, if utterly generic, prog/power band, with a great singer, strong playing, solid songs, and no spirit. If you’re a diehard of the genre, and you routinely spin DGM, At Vance, Bloodbound (the albums without Urban Breed), or Masterplan, then you’ll probably love this. It’s really a pretty good disc, assuming you either haven’t heard much other stuff like this, or you listen to nothing else. I happen to own enough stuff exactly like Dirt Metal that I’m not likely to buy it, but I would probably grab the disc if I saw it for a couple bucks in a used bin. I might never listen to it, but I wouldn’t exactly be ashamed to own it. If I ever found myself in the mood for modern power metal like this, though, I’d probably reach for some Nocturnal Rites, if only out of habit, because this is more or less as good as anything that band’s done post-Afterlife. It’s just no better, which is the problem.
— Friar Johnsen

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LUTHOR, A Shadow Out of Time (2012, self-released)

The skull:
There’s a lot going on here, but are those horns made out of snakes? Because that would be pretty awesome! Not awesome enough to redeem this mess of a cover, probably, but it couldn’t hurt. Rainbow covers like this are maybe even worse than brown covers. I mean, this was obviously meant to be brown all over, but someone, maybe the artist, maybe the band, realized near the end that they were looking at a very lame brown cover, and they tried to fix it by inexplicably adding some more color, like throwing a green gel over the projector when Frankenstein appears on screen. This is not a solution. The solution is to recompose the entire scene in a way that allows for a realistic spectrum of colors. You can’t just spray paint your lame brown cover and call it a day. It doesn’t work that way! And anyway, the reason this cover is a BDS is probably just that no one in the band could really parse Lovercraft’s descriptions of the Elder Race. We should be looking at a Big Dumb Rugose Cone, possibly the first of its kind, and yet here we are, puzzling over the 553rd Big Dumb Skull. I’d say that’s a hell of a missed opportunity.

The music:
From my years spent in the prog metal trenches, I know this type of band well. All these dudes probably grew up on Queensryche and that sort of operatic progressive metal, but when Nevermore came out, they realized the days of Mindcrime-worship were over, and they’d have to heavy up if they wanted to get anywhere. A huge part of the Nightmare Records catalog documents this phenomenon. That’s not to say that these bands are bad. Plenty of them are fine, maybe even good. But I think at the core, there’s a compromise in evidence here that taints the work in some fundamental way, if you know where to look. Or maybe it’s just me. Anyway, Luthor are pretty good at what they do, musically at least. Their singer is another story. Despite a Halford-esque range, his voice is charmless, his melodies dull, and his lyrics painfully on-the-nose, plus he’s very loud in the mix. As you might have guessed from the title, this is a concept EP based on the H.P. Lovecraft story of (almost) the same name, and if you bother to listen to the words you’ll get a Cliff’s Notes summary of the plot. As a concept album, this is about as successful as Nostradamus, although it has the benefit of brevity – it’s under 20 minutes long. There are some fine riffs scattered about here, the playing is tight, and the production is top notch, but I just can’t get excited by Luthor. They do show some potential, and maybe I’ll check out their new album, because if they can get their singer under control, they could probably do some damage. Maybe.
— Friar Johnsen

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SOPHICIDE, Perdition of the Sublime (2012, Willowtip)

The skull:
Perdition of the Sublime is perfect death metalese, a jury-rigged assembly of college entrance-exam test words strung together to form some semblance of a meaning, even if no one would ever use them in that order in a sentence. A bonus layer of antichristian mockery is included here, as “perdition” has a specific theological meaning that lends the objective “sublime” an almost oxymoronic air. But, no matter how to interpret the pretentious title, you’re unlikely to require a moon, a skull, or a tree. But once you’ve relegated the sublime to perdition, you have to make do with the base materials left behind, and in that case, I suppose Sophicide have done the best they could. Still, is brown the only non-sublime color? Must fucking be.

The music:
Sophicide sail the same sonic seas as Spawn of Possession or Soreption, and if Sophicide aren’t quite as good as either of those bands, they’re still an excellent technical death metal outfit, making music that delivers on both brutality and sophistication. For my tastes, this is a bit blastier than is ideal, but generally speaking, Sophicide aren’t tripping over themselves to out-evil the next band, while still presenting their heaviest elements without sounding like they’re trying too hard (a la Son of Aurelius’s first record), and the widdly instrumental bits are genuinely impressive. Naturally, songcraft is more or less ignored here, and the flow from riff to riff sounds random as much as anything, but rare are the moments where I feel the band just crammed two riffs together for lack of a better idea. The lead work is fairly astounding, too, even if it comes off sometimes as a bit TOO composed (I don’t require all-out-jazz in my lead guitar, but I prefer when leads at least give the impression of a player following his muse in the moment.) All in all, this is an excellent album, and certainly one of the best I’ve listened to for this project in the past year. Not just good for a Big Dumb Skull, this is honestly excelent and should be required listening for tech death enthusiasts.
— Friar Johnsen

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The skull:
Imagine: you’ve been buried alive. Your hands are bound behind your back, and your feet are also tied together. But, you refuse to just die! You’re gonna make it out of this living hell, you decide, and you enact the only escape plan available to you: you start chewing your way out. You gnaw through the splintery wooden coffin, then you start working on the dirt. Pretty soon, there’s no more room left in your coffin to spit it out, so you have to start swallowing it. Finally, finally, you break through the surface, ready to scream out for help, when you choke on that last subterranean mouthful and die. We’re talking O. Henry levels of irony here, or at least something Edgar Allen Poe might have scribbled on a napkin in a drunken stupor days before coming up with a much better take on the subject.

The music:
Days We Dread serves up the mix of mid-90s gothy death metal like Crematory and late 00s Dark Tranquillity that probably no one was asking for, and it does it with panache. Glum quarter-note downstroked riffs, nasal clean vocals, copious keyboards, and groovy downtuned chugs come together in this middling stew, and while nothing about Engraved is even remotely terrible, nothing is particularly interesting, either. The sound, playing, and pretty much everything else are top notch, but the songwriting is so boring, the source inspirations so uninspiring, that I struggle to imagine why anyone would have thought to make this, but I guess there must be people out there who just really pine for the days when you could load up on eyeliner, sing about how sad you are and how tragic your lovelife is, and still be playing death metal. If you’re that kind of person, then you definitely need this demo. It will complete you. I suppose if you like the last couple Mercenary albums, but wish they were a lot mopier, then this might also work for you. Otherwise, I think you can safely skip this one.
— Friar Johnsen

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CORE, Act of Hate (2012, Southcore)

The skull:
As an example of the mushroom cloud skull, this is as close to the archetype as you could reasonably expect a cover to come. It’s well drawn, and the ruined city beneath is a nice touch. I couldn’t say why the whole thing needed to be slathered in a thick layer of shit brown, though, except to speculate that Core were actually running down some kind of BDS checklist when they conceived of this artwork. Sure, this album was released 11 months before we Friars convened at this virtual monastery, but the will and desire of The Council are so strong that I suspect the entire human race feels the pull of The Skull in their dreams, like some vast Jungian synchronicity. I think it’s only a matter of time before some band designs their cover with the express intent of landing a spot in these hallowed halls, and I should say, such shameless attempts at currying The Council’s favor are highly likely to work, so get on it, ye bands of narrow vision!

The music:
Core never released an album, only some demos and some compilation tracks, and this disc collects them all together. In 2013, you might think that a band called Core were a technical death metal band or something, but in 1995, when this band was in its heyday, a name like Core immediately signaled that you were gonna get some shitty Pantera-inspired groove thrash. It’s kind of hard to remember those dark times, because that style of music has almost entirely gone away, but back in the mid 90s, these sorts of shitty Far Beyond Driven-meets-Roots amalgams were positively everywhere, and inescapable. Creatively bankrupt and aesthetically impotent, this stuff was the pits 20 years ago and it hasn’t gotten any better since. That said, guitarist/vocalist Dejan Knezevic is currently in a band called Pelvic Meatloaf, and I’m sure they’re awesome.
— Friar Johnsen