Tag Archives: brown

SKULL454

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SA Sanctuary, Abandon in Place  (2011, Butchered)

The skull:
An under-achieving piece of cover “art” on every single level: the skull image is not only dull, but has been used before (skull366); the band’s name is one of those clunky territory-staking ones (is Sanctuary such an amazing name that you have to hold onto it at all costs?); and the album title makes absolutely no sense. Regarding the latter, I amuse myself by imaging this as a square dance call in some highly surrealistic alternate universe: “Swing your partner round and round / heads promenade around  the town / gentlemen, abandon in place!” as the gentlemen perform difficult contortions that look like something from a dada dance troupe. The original cover did not feature a skull, but for god-knows-what reason it was reissued 10 years later with this masterpiece of artwork announcing to the world that SA Sanctuary are not to be forgotten!!!

The music:
SA Sanctuary play forgettable thrash. But first, the name: what is it with San Antonio bands and their unflagging loyalty to their name? First it was Slayer, who changed their name to SA Slayer, then it was Sanctuary, who changed it to SA Sanctuary when the Seattle Sanctuary got signed to a major. Is it worth all the fuss? No, it is not. SA Sanctuary sound like Acrophet. Or a Bizarro World version of Forbidden, where great bands in the real world are mirrored by lesser, failed facsimiles of themselves. Lots of gang vocals too. Typical of many Texas metal bands on the thrashier end of the spectrum, they have a fair amount of traditional metal melody creeping in. Seattle’s Sanctuary are way better. I hear SA Chozzen Phate have a new reissue set coming out, although no one is even sure if there’s actually another Chozzen Phate that forced this addendum to their name. We suspect they did it because it’s just what San Antonio metal bands do.
— Friar Wagner

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SHATTERED REALM, Broken Ties… Spoken Lies (2002, Eulogy Recordings)

The skull:
When Dr. Rappaport brushed the dirt away, she knew she’d found an exemplary specimen, a nearly complete skull that dated to a time long before it was believed that humans had settled in the area. But, as she moved outward from the skull she made an even more shocking discovery. The cheesy olde english logo, the defiant title, they could mean only one thing: the primitive people of this remote island had independently developed hardcore thousands of years before even the advanced civilizations in the west. Her mind reeled, as she began to ponder the implications. Had this person died of natural causes, or had they fallen at the hands of an out-of-control windmiller, or a poorly timed stage dive? The sumptuous grave goods already discovered at the site led her to believe that this person might have been some sort of chieftan or king, but now she had to consider that the skull belonged to no less important a figure than “frontman.” She knew she was about to turn the anthropological community on its head.

The music:
Shattered Realm sound almost exactly like Hatebreed, which is to say they sound like a bunch of shiteating hardcore kids who just heard Seasons in the Abyss and think it’s the most aggro shit ever. You get the expected knuckledragging breakdowns mixed with some rudimentary riff-like structures that wouldn’t even be good enough to satisfy Kerry King in 2000. Shattered Realm clearly didn’t have any budget for drum editing or quantizing, so they come across as agreeably shambling and loose, but that’s only to say they sound exactly as sloppy on disc as they surely do in the rehearsal room. The vocals are, as you’d imagine, a dumb mix of charmless growling and impotent yelling, and the lyrics are every bit as cliche, about trusting no one, believing in yourself, and fucking shit up. There are also some mentions of demons, so I guess these guys like death metal too? My favorite thing about Shattered Realm is that they’re from Asbury Park, NJ, which is exactly the sort of shitty town you’d expect to birth a band this lame.
— Friar Johnsen

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FALL OF SERENITY, Grey Man’s Requiem  (2001, Voice of Life)

The skull:
Pretty crappy design choices here. First, all that damn brown. Of course, brown as the “new black” was just gathering steam in 2001, so we’ll give them a pass on that. [Note: the image here looks more reddish-brown than the brownish-brown one my review is based on.] But the skull itself — could those four gold horn-type things on its forehead looks less attached to the forehead? They seem to just sort of float there, as if they’re implied. They’re definitely not actually affixed, in which case they’ve got no business hanging around. Horns are serious business! Same with those silver-y jaw-horns or whatever the fuck. And I’m not going to bother wagering a guess as to what all the other bony, horny junk is behind him. It’s actually nothing, really, just a mass of random stuff that looked cool at the time to whoever designed this thing on his lunch break. The poor skull itself kind of gets lost amidst all this horny brown nonsense.

The music:
After being inundated with a ton of average average black metal, average death/thrash/black metal, and average thrash metal (and above-average in the case of Mad Maze, skull358), it’s almost refreshing to get back to some good old Swedish melodic death metal from Germany. Almost. One thing’s for sure:  Germans do love them some In Flames. Remember Night In Gales? And Fall Of Serenity do it just like that, and they do it well enough, offering a style somewhere between Whoracle and Clayman-era In Flames. Of course, there is absolutely nothing original going on throughout Grey Man’s Requiem, it plays on the same old SMDM characteristics you’ve heard reeled off by countless bands through the years. But if you keep your standards low and cannot get enough of this stuff, you could do worse. It’s just what I’d expect out of a horn-laden gold skull in a field of brown, from Germany, circa 2001.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL359

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GANG, V (2010, Emanes Metal)

The skull:
Well, it’s big, that’s for sure. And the single eye is pretty awesome, despite the absolutely terrible Photoshop paste job. This is an ugly, lazy cover, make no mistake! The candles at least sort of set the scene, but the pentagram logo is a little distracting (it could certainly be better integrated) and the standard-issue brown wash that swamps the entire cover is a drag. Plus, it’s Christmas morning, and the Council gifted me a one-of-a-kind LP pressed in sterling silver of Megadeth’s Killing Is My Business… and I’d much rather be listening to that than critiquing this crappy French skull. Of course, the Council and we friars acknowledge no God but The Skull, but we all enjoy the gift-giving and camaraderie of the holiday season, not to mention the heavily boozed dairy beverages.

The music:
This totally un-Googlable album is a nice slice of melodic trad metal that nevertheless sounds more or less modern and not at all retro. Listening to V, the bands that immediately spring to mind are Artch and Hell (the new lineup, with Andy Sneap), although I offer these only as points of comparison, not to suggest that Gang were influenced by either band. Mercyful Fate are probably the common ancestor, although Gang doesn’t make a great effort to establish any occult vibe. The singer has a nasal delivery and a narrow range, but he puts his voice to good and dramatic use, and the riffing is solid and largely catchy. The drums sound programmed to me, but they’re basically alright sounding, and the rest of the production is perfectly fine. Gang aren’t about to become my new favorite band, but they’re pretty decent, and certainly good enough to get me to check out the rest of their fairly significant discography.
— Friar Johnsen

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WITHERIA, Spiral of Madness (2005, demo)

The skull:
Here’s a fine skull, emblazoned with some kind of logo sigil or something and hovering dead in the center of the cover. But, I dunno, wouldn’t it maybe be better if he was in the middle of a motherfucking spiral? Don’t even try to tell me that all that reticulated crap at the margins is a spiral. It is not a spiral. Shit like this makes me crazy, and the title is not Missing Spiral of Madness, or Where’s the Spiral of Madness? Am I asking too much? Am I being unreasonable? I am not.

The music:
9 times out of 10, a bad name equals a bad band, and let’s be frank: Witheria is a bad name. It conjures the memory of all those shitty goth metal bands of the mid 90s, something with violins and a woman with a reedy voice singing about swans and/or sadness. And yes, yes, we should not judge books by covers, bands by their name, etc, but we all do, and sometimes we get burned. I have a friend who stays amazingly on top of pretty much all the thrash and melodic death metal that comes out every year, and he posts epic lists of his findings every year, and he’s recommended this band THREE TIMES, and I think probably I just blanked out at “Witheria”. Well, my loss, because this band is pretty damned cool. They’re semi-complex thrash with crazy riffs and interesting arrangements, but they don’t come off as retro at all. The only older band they remind me of at all is my beloved Rosicrucian, and the resemblance is spiritual more than anything. The vocals are the only sticking point, and even they aren’t bad, tending toward the high raspy growl that was popular in the Gothenburg heyday. It’s just that it’s easy to imagine a more interesting vocal approach than this, considering the strength of the music. It’s pretty rare that a Big Dumb Skull band impresses me like this, and more or less as soon as I listened to these three tunes, I started tracking down their studio albums. And those even have great art as well (even if they sadly lack skulls in the conventional sense.) Here’s to unexpected gifts!
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL308

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LUCTUS/ARGHARUS, Sonitus Caeli Ardentis (2007, Ledo Takas)

The skull:
I think the title is Latin for, “The brown skull in the sky is ours.” Or something like that. The forecast is “cloudy with a 100% chance of skull.” The weird mismatched textures are either the result of inept Photoshoppery, or a concept a little higher than I’m willing to investigate right now. Maybe the skull is etched into the moon, which is crashing into the Earth and causing extreme weather. This is just too much for me to think about right now. I need to lie down.

The music:
Luctus are Marduky black metal. Argharus are a little more modern sounding, with a kind of industrial precision, but still fairly generic. And slower. Both bands are Lituanian and neither are particularly interesting, but it would take basically the best shit ever to interest me here. I really just don’t have a great tolerance for bandwagon black metal, so if a band isn’t going full-tilt avant-garde in their service to Satan, I’m just not their target audience. But hey, maybe you have a few dozen black and white albums with songs about war and snow and satan, and you’re thinking about branching out into browns and sepias. If so, well, this is definitely your jam. Get on it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL261

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MASTIC SCUM, Dust (2009, Twilight Vertrieb)

The skull:
Wheels within wheels, man. Or gears within skulls, whatever. This is a sharp looking biomech who succeeds on the details. Note the plate in his forehead and the exhaust vents astern, and of course the obligatory barcode (here emblazoned on his jaw). Lots of skulls go for this grimy industrial look, but most of them come off looking like rejected drafts for a Photoshop class. This guy nails it, and though he is to be docked points for presenting his skullacity in profile, and perhaps for a cliched surfeit of brown, he compensates with tasteful highlighting and some truly spectacular teeth.

The music:
Mastic Scum grind after the fashion of Napalm Death, with the death metal quotient turned up a bit. Though not as endearingly jarring as the godfathers of grind, Mastic Scum apply the formula well. The buzzy, super-high-gain guitars and the precise drum work summon a recollection of Fear Factory in better days, but really, most of the “industrial” in Mastic Scum is delegated to the artwork. I won’t say that this sort of music thrills me especially, but I can appreciate craft when I hear it, and Mastic Scum do this style about as well as anyone.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL227

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BEYOND THE SILENCE, Soulless Entity (2010, self-released)

The skull:
A snake crawling out of a socket, a giant eyeball, and a logo that screams “crappy deathcore,” this is clearly a cover that takes sucking very seriously. Rendered in the government-issued browns and yellows that are the official colors of BDS nation, this skull futher attempts to gild the shitty lily with some kind of faux-halftone screen effect, for some reason. Probably because the guy who was tasked with assembling the disparate elements of this ur-generic cover just learned how to do it in Photoshop. “This will look great in my portfolio, and will demonstrate to clients and employers my facility with the many functions of CS5,” you can practically read in a thought bubble above some terrible designer’s head. Translated from the original French, of course.

The music:
Super sloppy melodic death metal with gurgly, low, brutal death metal growls, Beyond the Silence appear to be trying to inject some early 90s style Swedish death metal into the melodic framework of modern deathcore. This is neither a good idea nor defly executed. The drummer is the hapless hero here: he consistently reaches for beats and fills well beyond his ability, and his constant flubbing lends the music a shot of honest naivety. He never elevates the proceedings to even the lowest reaches of what could be considered “good,” but there’s something about an old-fashioned Russian Dragon that delights the death metal nostalgist in me. The breakdowns and the burpy vocals, however, dispel that goodwill rather quickly, as do the utterly generic riffs. Beyond the Silence emerged from the French ether to issue this lone EP in 2010 and have evidently done nothing since, so I can now attempt to revert to my natural state of not knowing or caring about them.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL221

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AS I LAY DYING, Frail Words Collapse (2003, Metal Blade)

The skull:
A so-sad skull fades into the brown and yellow light, swathed and surrounded in presumably frail words, and also some olde-tyme type filligree, for some reason. Bringing to bear every Photoshopic power of the legendary Metal Blade design team, this cover absolutely explodes, I mean collapses, with mediocrity. A more fittingly banal cover would be hard to imagine, even for the ace artistic wizards working under the crack and lash of Brian Slagel’s whip.

The music:
Singer Tim Lambesis explained in a recent blog post that over the past several years, he had lost his once-prominent Christian faith (as would have been obvious, he further stated, to close readers of his lyrics and internet statements, which suggests his belief in mythical creatures had not entirely departed.) His break-up with God conveniently coincided with his decision to hire a hitman to murder his ex-wife, but having been brought to heel before the assassination could happen, and having spent some time in the hoosegow, he’s perhaps not surprisingly started to reconsider his newfound skepticism. But back in 2003, he was still an eager young theologist asking this big questions. Why are we here? Why do bad things happen to good people? Is it okay to brazenly rip-off the flavor-of-the-month metal band for personal profit? As I Lay Dying were at the vanguard of cheap Killswitch Engage imitation, arriving fully-formed just a year after KSE’s widely-copied Alive of Just Breathing. Back then you could still kinda hear the hardcore influence in this nascent metalcore, but the basic recipe was and is: add some goopy clean vocals to pale In Flames worship, and you’ve got yourself an album. As I Lay Dying are certainly no worse than most of the zillion or so bands to brazenly steal the sound Killswitch Engage barely invented, and you might even call them one of the better metalcore bands, but if you’ve read Big Dumb Skulls for long, you’ll know how much water that carries around here. I sorta like the angular, noisy, Meshuggeneh “A Thousand Steps,” but this quasi-song is less than two minutes, evidently all the interest this band could manage to summon. 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. Which is to say, it sounds nothing like the metalcore of even 2006, let alone the sad remnants of that instantly-tired movement in 2013.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL191

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SUBMISSION, Failure to Perfection (2010, Listenable)

The skull:
Brown and mustard. Not off to a good start. The rayed background is lame, too. The skull, which is shamefully obscured by a very boring logo, is flanked by a couple guns, and then some dog skulls or something? And then there’s a big screw. This is about as random as it gets, but it’s also a pretty good representation of the title, which itself fails to even form a syntactical sentence fragment. What we have here is a total commitment to half-assing it.

The music:
Groovy melodic death metal, kind of like recent Dark Tranquillity, with fairly awful growls and a smattering of reasonably good clean vocals. Submission aren’t doing anything new, but they work this style admirably well, with some really cool guitar riffs to keep things moving. The drums, while proficiently played, offer no surprises, and there are too many core-style breakdowns for my liking, but overall, Submission are alright. I doubt I’ll go out and buy their disc, but at least listening to it for this review wasn’t painful. Anymore, that’s about as good as it gets here at Skull HQ.
— Friar Johnsen