Tag Archives: crossbones

Crossbones or similar

SKULL656

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MALICIOUS DAMAGE, Malicious Damage (1989, demo)

The skull:
How many seconds do you think it took them to come up with this one?

The music:
I was hoping for some delicious jammage from this four-song, 11-minute tape. I mean, death/thrash metal from Florida circa 1989? I’m in. What we get is some fairly standard thrash, no more, no less. It’s fast, that’s for sure, but it was already getting a bit late for new thrash bands to enter the scene, bust down the door and impress. Pretty sure this demo got a handful of okay reviews in the ‘zines despite a mostly “ho hum” reception from the greater metal world. I was around then, totally immersed in metal of all kinds, reading shitloads of ‘zines, and I don’t remember any sort of buzz on Malicious Damage. The vocalist sneers like a Zetro-meets-Killian madman, and it’s both annoying and impressive at the exact same time. You have to credit his ferocity. Musically it recalls those vocalists’ bands, merging the off-kilter madness of early Exodus with the more disciplined frenzy of Vio-lence. Unfortunately it’s more Acrophet than Gammacide, if you know what I mean. I have to give special mention to the guitar sound, which is a warped, overdriven, vacuum-cleaner kinda thing at its best (opener “Can’t Escape”). Weirdly, it sounds like the demo was recorded in separate sessions, as there’s a much cleaner guitar sound by the time you get to third song, “Killing Season.” Or maybe you’re just used to it by then. Inexplicably, the band returned in 2005 with an EP proceeded to put three self-released albums out there that, I’m going to imagine, were received with only lukewarm enthusiasm. Helluva demo cover though, yeah!
— Friar Wagner

SKULL629

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FAITH OR FEAR, Demo of Fear ’86 (1986, demo)

The skull:
Who’s not scared of pirates, right? I mean, when you imagine your worst nightmare, the most abject terror, of course you picture the Jolly Roger. THAT’S that kind of fear we’re talking about. And not just any pirates, either, but ’86 pirates, with goofy haircuts and clothes that are a patchwork of dayglo neons and corporate logos. That’s some serious shit-your-pants fear, right? Right?

The music:
Some people only know Faith or Fear as the band who donated guitarist Meritt Gant to Overkill, but in truth, Gant was only in the band for about a year. Anyone else who knows Faith or Fear is likely to consider them a very poor substitute for a great melodic thrash band like Forbidden. It’s not that Faith or Fear were terrible, because they were reasonably good. It’s just that “reasonably good” among thrash bands in the late 80s put you pretty far down the ladder. I always wanted to like this band more than I do, because I have a soft spot for thrash bands with melodic singers, but Tim Blackman just isn’t a very good vocalist. His range is pretty narrow (excepting a few screams) and he doesn’t do a whole lot with what he has. But, he’s not awful, and the music is crunchy and more-or-less well written, so even though Faith or Fear were a decidedly third tier band, I guess you could say they were one of the better bands in that cohort. This is their first demo, and while only one of these songs made it to their lone full-length (recorded before their reunion, I mean), their sound was more or less in place from the start. Again, imagine Forbidden, minus the trickiest riffs and most of the hooks. That’s Faith or Fear. Of course, hailing from New Jersey, Faith or Fear were more likely to sprinkle in tough guy posturing than their left coast contemporaries, but at least they never devolved into goofy silliness, a la Anthrax at their worst (or best, I guess, if that’s how your tastes run.) Obviously, if you’ve never heard this band, you’ll want to start (and probably end) with their 1989 full length, Punishment Area, and even if you get beyond that, there’s a new album (which I haven’t heard) and a compilation of rerecorded demo tracks (although not stretching back so far as to encompass this particular demo), so you’d have to be really, really into Faith or Fear to have any reason to listen to Demo of Fear ’86 and probably everyone who would ever be that into this band already owns an original cassette copy.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL595

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SKULLCRUSHER, Demo Version 2002 (2002, demo)

The skull:
It’s like this skull and this skull fucked and made an ugly skullbaby, who quit high school and took a job on a pirate flag for a buck over minimum wage and was like, “Fuck you losers, I’m outta this shit town for good!” and they were like, “You’re an ingrate and a bum and we never loved you!” and he was all, “Fffuuh!”

The music:
I couldn’t find this demo anywhere, but from the looks of this cover I’d say this is blackened rethrash, like Destruction doing Bathory covers while Greek. Releasing a cassette demo in 2002 was a pretty bold move: at least as contrarian as releasing a vinyl demo in 2035 or whatever.
— 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

SKULL572

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TÖRR, Kladivo Na Čarodějnice (1993, Monitor)

The skull:
Törr love the Big Dumb Skull. I mean, they really love it. This compilation cover is basically the same as their first demo, with the logo moved up a bit to obscure less of the skull, and that’s why we chose it, but several of their other albums feature skulls that are even bigger and dumber. For all I know, “Törr” is Czech for Skull. In fact, that’d be so great that I’m just going to assume it’s true, without doing any research that might disprove it. Anyway, this guy looks positively crestfallen, so bummed out, but he’s got so much going on. I want to say, “Hey man, dry your eye holes! You’re a skull! You’re big and dumb, and I mean that in the best way. You’ve got fangs! You’ve got crossbones! You’ve got an upside-down cross earring, for fuck’s sake! You’re the star of the show, alone on a black background! Do you know how many skulls are forced to languish on fields of scratchy brown nonsense? How many skulls are forced to share the stage with Photoshopped snakes and cheap looking fire? You’re drawn by hand, you’re a total badass, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!”

The music:
If you find yourself in a place with a lot of dudes in denim vests covered in patches, at least one of those vests will sport a Törr patch. And that’s about as much as I knew about Törr before now. I guess I always assumed they were a black metal band of low fidelity and repute. Instead, they’re a kind of weird Czech band (which, I realize, is something of a redundant description) who play a thrashy heavy metal with a serious Venom/Bathory influence. It’s not super aggressive, and it’s not particularly extreme. And I like it! They’re kind of like a light Czech Sodom (and if you find yourself listening to some of their later stuff, like Tempus Fugit, the notion that Törr is just a straight-up translation of Sodom to Czech is inescapable). This release is a compilation of re-recorded tracks from the band’s early days, and while most bands of this sort, if they had the chance to re-record their demos, would make them heavier, bigger, more, but Törr instead opted to clean everything up a little bit, and while the rawness that defined the original material is more or less polished away, what’s left is a refined take on what was evidently a little more sophisticated than anyone might have imagined. From what I can tell, the band got heavier again after this, and rawer, so maybe they didn’t like the way these tunes came out the second time, but personally, I think they work well.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL560

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DOKKEN, Broken Bones (2012, Frontiers)

The skull:
Well, the artist at least broke, however subtly, the crossbones. I’ll give him that, and nothing more. This is one lazy-ass cover, but perfectly in keeping with the standards typical of anything bearing the name Don Dokken. The logo is (still) cool, and the colors are pretty, but clearly now I’ve entered the realm of “if you can’t say anything nice…” and saying nice things is not really my forte, so I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

The music:
God damn, Don Dokken sucks so bad. His voice is peerlessly bland and utterly without body or soul, and while I’m not going to say there’s never been a good Dokken tune, there’s absolutely never been a good Don Dokken performance. He’s one of these mysterious, talentless fucks who is a magnet for skilled musicians. Here he’s roped in some nameless but undoubtedly talented musicians to perform (and probably write, I’m guessing) his perfectly serviceable heavy AOR, all so he could dick it up with his barely whispered mewling. This approach almost works on the fastest, most engaging tunes like the opener “Empire,” but when Don is given a crunchy, bluesy number to anchor, as he is with “Blind,” he ruins it almost completely. To be fair, this is the kind of gutless hair metal stomper that probably only David Coverdale at his peak could redeem, but that makes Don’s attempt all the sadder. The pseudo-ballad “Burning Tears,” meanwhile, might really have been an affecting tune in the hands of the right singer (Michael Eriksen of Circus Maximus, say, or even Vanden Plas’ Andy Kuntz, who is basically the answer to the question, “What would Don Dokken sound like if he didn’t utterly blow?”) but Dokken’s passionless moaning nearly kills the tune. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised at how enjoyable the songwriting is here (for the most part), but I will never get over how this no-talent sleazewad ever landed a paying gig as a singer.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL552

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DEZPERADOZ, An Eye for an Eye (2008, AFM)

The skull:
The typography is obviously inspired by the handbills and wanted posters of the mythical old west, and dem crossbones is pistols, but this whole design looks more like an ad for a sad burlesque revival featuring hipsters in Betty Page push up bras and ten gallon hats winking and pointing toy guns at the ironically mustachioed crowd, while making corny double entendres and singing along to some jaunty number performed on a tinny upright piano. Which is to say, it takes me to a very sad place inside and makes me want to cry.

The music:
I first encountered this band, originally known as Desperados, in a used CD shop in Palm Desert, CA in 2001. I was on a desperate and lonely work assignment, and deep in a sour mood when I found the shop in some ungodly strip mall, and I must have arrived there shortly after some metalhead dumped a large part of his fairly interesting collection. I must have bought 25 discs from that place, and one of them was Desperados. I picked it up to examine because it had the GUN logo on it, and when I saw that the band included none other than Tom Angelripper of Sodom, I put it in my pile immediately. From maintaining a Sodom fanpage back in the mid 90s, and from several interviews I conducted with Tom, I knew him to be a huge wild west enthusiast, but I had never heard of the band, which turned out to be a project led by Alex Kraft, who also spent time in Tom’s Onkel Tom joke band. Anyway, that first album sounded basically like low grade, late 90s Sodom, but all the songs were about the wild west. It was mildly amusing, but not so good that when the band changed names and issued a second album without Angelripper, I had any interest in keeping. But here I am, nearly 15 years later, forced to contend again with Dezperados. An Eye for an Eye is the band’s third outing, but most of the thrash is gone, replaced with a kind of souped-up spaghetti western metal. Imagine some guy pitching “Ennio Morricone meets Rammstein” to the suits at AFM, and you’ve pretty much got the idea. I suppose this is a successful realization of the concept, but the concept just doesn’t do much for me. If you love the soundtracks to old western shoot-em-ups, but wish they featured a few more crunchy riffs, then this, my friend, is the disc for you. Elsewise, relegate Dezperadoz to that part of your brain dedicated to odd metal trivia and move on with your life.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL543

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ANTROPOID, Danger (2007, self-released)

The skull:
“Antropoid” is actually the Slovak word for “pirate,” and this is just one of the many signs you’ll see to alert you to freebooter crossings while motoring down the picturesque highways of this landlocked central European nation. Over the years, many of these signs have been stolen by Running Wild fans, and as a result, the crushed corpses of patch-eyed, hook-handed, peg-legged seamen litter the shoulders of many rural roads. Conservationists consider this part of the world ground zero in the effort to preserve wild pirates from extinction, but privately, most would express deep reservations about the possibility of protecting the remaining stock of buccaneers.

The music:
Sounding like a mix of early 90s Anthrax (at the dire end of the first Joey Belladonna era) and recent Metallica (trying very hard to be heavy, but sucking fairly badly), Antropoid are rather hard to explain. Why would a band try to sound this way, in 2007, especially? Maybe the better albums were too hard to come by in Slovakia, or maybe Antropia were just a bunch of kids who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. That said, though their songs are not very good, they play them with a commendable enthusiasm that I find unavoidably appealing. Antropoid might actually have fared very well in today’s flaccid rethrash scene, although they’d have to bone up on their Exodus and Slayer, but they appear to already have passed into the great moshpit beyond.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL497

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KICKHUNTER, Hearts & Bones

The skull:
It’s possible that this cover was constructed in Photoshop, but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look like a photo of a real tattoo, and what a doozy it is. I desperately hope that the guitarist got this tattoo explicitly for his album cover. That would be some real dedication. It’s not quite as good as three guys getting the Exhorder logo tattooed on their arms, but it’s still pretty serious. I especially hope that he did this to surprise his bandmates. He shows up one day at rehearsal, a couple weeks before the band is scheduled to hit the studio, and he dramatically pulls off his leather jacket to reveal his new ink. “Behold! The cover of our debut album!” “But, dude, the album is gonna be called Hearts & Bones. Like, more than one heart,” the singer immediately notes. “God damn it, you’re such a fucking dick. I did this for you fucking guys! Can’t you for once be happy?” “No, man, it’s not like that! It’s cool! But like, don’t you think it would be cooler if you added like another couple hearts or something? There’s still room…” “GOD DAMN IT JIMMY! I’M NOT ADDING MORE HEARTS!” “Jeez, dude, calm down, I’m just saying. I mean, no one asked you to get a fucking tattoo for the band! Like, maybe I was already planning on getting my denim jacket airbrushed with the cover art? Did you ever think of that?” And so on. But, happy ending: they worked it out and made like three or four totally shitty albums together.

The music:
Is there anything worse than new hair metal? At least in the 80s, when such crap was popular, you could imagine some percentage of the assholes engaged in this sort of behavior were doing it cynically to get laid, or were just going with the flow, having no sense of good or bad. But in the 00s? You’d have to fucking love hair metal to make an album sounding like this, which is tantamount to getting a tattoo on your forehead that proclaims, “I have shitty taste in music!” I mean, the skull tattoo already implies as much, but I’m talking about making it explicit. Anyway, I’m not going to be able to make much in the way of concrete comparisons to describe this awful band, because I hate this shit with the energy of a thousand suns, but in broad strokes, Kickhunter falls on the bluesier, less glammy side of the hair metal spectrum. More like Tora Tora than Sleez Beez. Or maybe like Kingdom Come with a much crappier singer. Fuck, I hate myself for even knowing these bands exist, but Kickhunter, they’re trying to SOUND like them. I’m ashamed for them, and sad for the world.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL463

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NIHILIST, demo 1990 (1990, demo)

The skull:
Sometimes, two crossbones are not enough. In fact, sometimes, enough is never enough, as you can see here. It looks like whenever the artist was about to be finished, he decided to add something else, be it a bandana, some pirate runes, a stick of dynamite (?), or whatever that squiggly shit in the lower left is. It more or less works, but only because all the junk is added to the periphery of this fine piratical skull. He does seem to have something in his mouth, but at this low resolution, I’m having trouble making it out. Is it a clock? Is it an eyeball? Only Nihilist knows, and they just don’t care enough to make shit clear. Say what you will about the tenets of NSBM, but at least it’s an ethos.

The music:
If you couldn’t already tell from the logo, this is not the Swedish Nihilist, the band that spawned both Entombed and Unleashed. Instead, this is a thrash band from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the country!) I couldn’t locate this actual demo, but I was able to sample some other Nihilist tunes, and I must say, they seem to have been a pretty good band. They were fairly groovy for thrash, reminding me a little of what White Zombie would do, musically, on their lone good disc, La Sexorcisto, even if Nihilist aren’t animated by the same campy fun. This demo was even recorded by Scott Burns, so it probably sounded great. For a demo-level band, Nihilist were incredibly polished and impeccably tight, and while plenty of good bands somehow slipped through the cracks back in the golden days, I’m definitely surprised that no one has given this band the deluxe reissue treatment. This stuff is screaming for a Stormspell or Divebomb compilation to collect all of their demos. Get on it, intrepid reissuers!
— Friar Johnsen