Tag Archives: cracked

SKULL647

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FRAGMENT, Fragment (2011, demo)

The skull:
From the shadow, I guess we’re to imagine this cracked skull fell onto a large canvas featuring a two-color painting of birds and hash marks. That doesn’t make any sense, but the alternative, that a skull enshrouded in some black miasma got stuck on an old TV radial antenna while some birds, eager to slurp up the remains of his exposed grey matter, circle in the background, is even more confounding, so I guess I’m going to run with the painting interpretation. Or maybe run from it. Yeah, that’s a better preposition there.

The music:
Fragment sound like a traditional Scandinavian death metal band who, in 1995 suddenly realized that “melodic” is the hot new prefix to “death metal” and started adding twin axe harmonies and a bit of dynamics to their sound. The basic sound is still more or less old school, but the trim is decidedly newer. Of course, Fragment are a new band, and not some act from the mid 90s, which makes the exact alchemy of their sound a bit harder to explain, but in any case, it works pretty well, and serves as a tonic for the various trendy death metal strains of today, most of which are rather annoying. The sound is also refreshingly naturalistic (at least as much as death metal can sound) and there are no obvious markers of studio shortcuts to be heard. All in all, this is a solid demo of well-written, moderately technical (in the way Death was technical) death metal, and I while I think the band might find their particular sound to be a tough sell, if they stick it out I bet they release a killer debut album.
— Friar Johnsen

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SOCIAL DESPAIR, Social Despair (2007, demo)

The skull:
I don’t recall seeing another skull with only half a jaw. For all the violence we’ve seen visited on skulls here at Skull HQ, this seems the most brutal. What holds the thing on, I can’t say, but I bet it hurts like all hell. Fortunately, this guy looks to be riding out his Hellraiser-esque eternity in style, what with that kickin’ mullet and badass fangs. He’s probably like, “Yeah, I’m all chained up through a hole in my top, and my bottom jaw is fucking busted in half, but they didn’t even ding the fangs! Suckers!” That’s some Myth of Sisyphus-level existentialism right there, folks.

The music:
Obviously, this is a thrash band. Obviously. The name, the logo, and of course the cover all give it away. But, they don’t have the sound of a trendhopping rethrash act. Instead, they sound like a bunch of meatheads who wanted to play death metal but found it was just too hard, so they dumbed it down and arrived at some kind of remedial thrash, the sort played by high school bands in 1991 who mostly decorated their denim vests with Metallica patches but who just discovered Deicide. The sound is awful, the playing sloppy, the riffs dull, and the vocals unlistenable. At least the songs are short. Interestingly, Social Despair appear to have released an album only last year — there’s proof of it on their Facebook page — but despite an even more awesome BDS cover, the album doesn’t appear on Metal Archives and I can’t find sound samples for it. So, maybe Social Despair got their act together and turned into a good band, although I can’t say I have particularly high hopes for a record called Refusal for Abreaction.
— Friar Johnsen

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PENTAGRAM (CHILE), Demo #2 (1987, demo)

The skull:
A grisly subject, this skull is cracked and bloodied no doubt from being run through a photocopier a couple dozen times, the hard way. He’s managed to keep his shit together, but only barely, and you can see in his gritted smile that he can’t put up with too much more of this. A skull has his limits!

The music:
Pentagram are minor legends based on, really, just a couple of demos from the mid 80s. They played thrash bordering on death metal that you could place somewhere between Kreator and Possessed, and while they never do anything especially original, they were certainly among the first bands in Chile to be playing this sort of thing, and it can’t be denied that they do it well. On this second demo, they even somehow approximate the fabled Sunlight Studios guitar tone a year before Nihilist’s first demo, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those Swedish lads took direct inspiration from their South American contemporaries. You can’t come to Pentagram looking for sophistication or technicality, but if you have a fondness for this sort of raw proto-death metal, then you should certainly check them out. Both demos from 1987 were released on CD a few years ago, although I believe that compilation is itself out of print and hard to come by, but the band is back together with a new album, and I imagine it’s just a matter of time before their classic material is available again.
— Friar Johnsen

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SKELETONWITCH, Skullsplitter (2011, Prosthetic)

The skull:
This one’s a beaut, no denying it. Skeletonwitch have lately released a number of singles featuring big dumb skulls, and we’ve chosen this one as the skulliest. It’s just a lovely, moody painting of a floating skull, split as advertised. The skulls edges seem weirdly sharp, though, which almost make it look like the whole thing was made of papier-mâché. And if that’s the case, and considering the gaping hole, I think we have to assume that this skull was actually a grisly piñata. Normally, when you bust one open you try to break the bottom, to get at the candy. But it wouldn’t have mattered here, because this skullata was filled with green vapor, black blood, and probably spiders, and they made it out all the same.

The music:
For some reason, I don’t really consider Skeletonwitch to be a part of the rethrash scene, although musically there’s probably a case to be made that I should. Like Toxic Holocaust and Municipal Waste, Skeletonwitch injects a lot of crusty, punky noise into their music, but the primary influence is Slayer, and while they probably appeal more or less to the same backpatch enthusiasts, they seem less like a blatant act of pastiche than, I dunno, Warbringer. Still, there’s not a lot of creativity on display here, and the vocals are shit, so unless you hoover up every new band that vaguely reminds you of Cryptic Slaughter, you can do without this, and pretty much everything else by Skeletonwitch. Unless you just love sweet covers, in which case you should probably buy their entire discography!

— Friar Johnsen

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ONSLAUGHT, What Lies Ahead (1983, demo)

The skull:
Yet another cracked up skull on a demo. Yawn. There’s a certain desperate look to this guy, though, that I like. A sadness, even. He knows he’s in a bad way, but he lost the ability to reason when his brain leaked out. Wracked with confusion, he’s only just realizing he can’t even scream “FUCK!” without lips. If he knew that what lies ahead is like four more demos of this shit, well, I think he’d completely wig out.

The music:
I’ll admit that I’m not a great fan of the first two Onslaught albums, which are held to be classics by many people. I vastly prefer their third album, the shamelessly Metallica-inspired In Search of Sanity, which also features one of my favorite British metal singers, Steve Grimmett, formerly of Grim Reaper. But, even were I fond of Power from Hell and The Force, I don’t think I’d particularly love this demo. It’s as much punk as it is metal, sounding like a Discharge cover band that also loved Venom. That’s not entirely a bad thing, and I can at least appreciate the energy on display, but the execution is just too raw for my tastes. A lot of the songs on this demo made it to the band’s proper debut, and while they don’t change much, the shift from hardcore to thrash is striking. Going from the demo to the album, the vocals changes from barking to snarling, and the guitarists learned how to properly speed pick for their LP while on the demo they’re just strumming their simple chord progressions. But if you like crusty pseudo-thrash along the lines of Hellbastard, or if you like Power from Hell but not as much as you love Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing then maybe What Lies Ahead is worth a listen.
— Friar Johnsen

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ASPID, Manqueta (1991, demo)

The skull:
“What? Yeah, I’m a little cracked up in the back, but I think that looks kind of cool anyway, and hey, check out these pearly whites! You don’t see a lot of skulls with a full set of gleaming choppers like these, do you, baby? Hey, where are you going? Why you gotta be leaving? That’s okay, though, cause I like the view. Oh yeah, you know I got eyes, or something. And they like what they see baby, so why don’t you back that thing up? Come on, baby, bring it on back to Skully!”

The music:
There have been a lot of Aspids, but this isn’t the best one. The best Aspid were a Russian tech thrash band who released the excellent Extravasation album in 1993. But this Aspid, the Spanish one, at least started out okay. (For the record, “aspid” is another name for the European viper.) Manqueta is reasonably good speed metal, something of a cross between Agent Steel and early Arakain. Good riffing and solid, high pitched vocals (with lyrics in Spanish.) The sound and the style scream 1986, but as this demo came out in 1991, Aspid were clearly a little behind the times. Sadly, they would later get with the times by dumbing down and moving in a groove metal direction. But for a little while in the early 90s, Aspid were a pretty cool band, and speed metal afficianados would do well to track this one down for their collections.
— Friar Johnsen

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DEBRIS INC., Debris Inc. (2005, Rise Above)

The skull:
A cracked skull lays in the abyss, surrounded for some unknown reason by a chaos symbol (a cluster of eight arrows pointing all directions). Why? We can have no idea. The band name, which is also the album title, gives no good indication for presenting the skull to us in this way. Maybe it’s because, you know, it’s a skullll, maaaan.

The music:
“Masterminded” by Trouble bassist Ron Holzner and Saint Vitus guitarist Dave Chandler, this might have been a good idea if the dudes stuck to doing the kind of doom they do best. But they didn’t. They decided Chandler could sing (he can’t, not even close), Ron also gets in on the act, and they thought playing “drunken doom punk” was a really good idea. It’s horrible. Every last second of this 14-song disaster is horrible. Sounds like 12-year-olds trying their hand at Eyehategod tunes. The worst record ever released on Rise Above, and the worst thing Ron and Dave have ever been involved with. A total disgrace. Zero out of 10 fucking skulls!
— Friar Wagner

 

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CANNIBAL CORPSE, The Wretched Spawn (2004, Metal Blade)

The skull:
This is just the censored version of the cover, which crops out a trio of zombie doctors presiding over a fairly implausible double caesarian/natural delivery. The skull in question is just a detail of the decor in their abominable operating theater, or something. It kind of looks like bone, but it would make more sense if it was just a carved detail in a larger wooden piece. The skull is splattered with blood, despite being what looks to be a fair distance from the table, so I guess you know that a lot of really nasty shit goes down here. Or whatever. Man, it’s hurting my head trying to impose narrative on a Cannibal Corpse album cover.

The music:
I’ve hated Cannibal Corpse for a long time. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t hated any metal band so vehemently for so long. I bought their first album, on cassette, shortly after I had discovered Carcass. I went back to the same shop and said, “Give me something like Symphonies of Sickness!” and that asshole sold me Eaten Back to Life. Now, I will grant that Cannibal Corpse have improved over the years, and some of their post-Chris Barnes albums almost sort of approach listenable, but in truth, even the best of them are fairly bad. It’s the same fucking shit, over and over, with the same inane lyrics belted out with the same charmless growl, and some of the most boring death metal drumming ever. I do understand the appeal of this band to angry, awkward teenagers who want to piss off their parents (it is eternally offensive after all), but I can’t for the life of me understand how an adult (who isn’t a sociopath) could find anything to like in Cannibal Corpse. Nostalgia for their awkward and angry adolescence? Who knows. Some day, arthritis of the neck will permanently disable Alex Webster and Corpsegrinder, and when that happens, here’s hoping the former retires to a quiet senescence making Blotted Science albums with Ron Jarzombek, and the latter leaves the scene forever to get fat in front of his monitors, playing the 17th iteration of World of Warcraft.
— Friar Johnsen