Tag Archives: dirt

SKULL535

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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

SKULL443

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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

SKULL411

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LAST ETERNAL BREATH, From a Tormented Soul (2011, demo)

The skull:
This one is a textbook example of a skull photo scanned from a textbook. It’s a photo taken without even the slightest artistry, but the skull is quite large, and if nothing else the 3/4-from-the-top profile is something we don’t see too often in the BDS compound. The chunks of what looks like concrete are the only fun detail here. I imagine that the former owner of this skull tried eating them, maybe while high on PCP, and puked them up in his last eternal barf. His final thought was, “Fuck. They’re totally going to figure out that I was eating cement. I’m gonna look so stupid.”

The music:
Busy, technical death metal not unlike Decrepit Birth or Obscura, although not as brutal as the former nor as exploratory as the latter, Last Eternal Breath are nevertheless a fairly good example of the form. This demo is not especially well-recorded, but it’s not horrible sounding either, and it’s a pleasant change of pace to hear music like this that hasn’t been sampled and quantized to death. This is very much the sound of a band who could only afford four days to record and mix, and rehearsed the shit out of their material in advance of their studio session. These days, “technical death metal” can mean a lot of things, and in most cases, it means I’m not gonna like it, but these guys fall in that narrow range that appeals to me, even if I can’t wholeheartedly endorse them. A little more time spent on songwriting and developing at least one original hook would help, but even if they just polish what they’ve got to a high sheen, they’ll be good enough to compete with all but the very best bands working this style in no time. And even at that, they’re already much better than most of the bands on Unique Leader.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL242

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BLOOD THIRSTY DEMONS, In the Grave  (2004, C.M.)

The skull:
Two of two in our look at Italian band Blood Thirsty Demons, who somehow made it into the Skullection with two skull album covers in a row. I have not yet conferred with the good friar Johnsen regarding his views on the band’s music, but I’m pretty sure I got the superior cover. It’s immediately apparent that this skull is not in the grave at all, so I’m assuming he’s a runaway, or perhaps taking some kind of furlough from his skull-in-the-grave duties to tra-la-la his way through the beautiful Italian countryside. I would not be surprised if the next panel in this skull’s adventures found Dorothy, Toto and the Scarecrow skipping down the road and coming upon the skull. They would quickly realize he is not the next one they’re looking for (the Tin Man), so the Scarecrow gives a swift kick to the skull and they carry merrily on. This leaves the skull deeply hurt, wishing he’d never left the grave in the first place. It ain’t yellow brick, this road, it’s a sloping, bumpy dirty path, but c’mon people, a friar’s gotta use his imagination this far into the Skullection.

The music:
Sanctis Ghoram of the Paul Chain band and that guy in Dark Quarterer are pretty terrible singers, but they have a kind of charm. The dude in Blood Thirsty Demons, however, is just a shitty vocalist; no charm, no character, nothing. And musically this album is a shambles, merging traditional metal, doom, a little thrash, even some punk. None of it is interesting or memorable. It’s not even played very well. And no, “C.M.” does not stand for Century Media. No respectable label in their right mind would sign these guys. (P.S. I have since read Friar Johnsen’s review of Blood Thirsty Demons’ other skull-laden album. He was much kinder to them, and that’s terrific. It might be a better album than this. It is five years on from this earlier one. But I am in one seriously shitty mood today, so sitting through 31 minutes of this guy’s yelping and his band’s hashed together metal junk is not helping lift my spirits.)
— Friar Wagner

SKULL226

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SPIDER KICKERS, Recognize the Corpse  (2001, self-released)

The skull:
Now how are we supposed to recognize the corpse when there’s nothing but a partial skull and petrified French fries strewn about? That’s nothing to go on — everybody eats French fries! It doesn’t help that this is viewed through some kind of infra-red lens or something. Nope, not gonna be any corpse-recognizing happening here today. Whaddya think we are, CSI or some shit?

The music:
What an incredibly stupid band name. Taken literally, these guys must be jerks if they go around kicking spiders. I’d like to see them kick something a bit less defenseless and puny, like a scorpion, or a badger. They’re from Greece, so maybe something’s getting lost in translation here. These guys wallowed in demo/self-release purgatory until the Sleaszy Rider label came calling in 2007, although even that doesn’t seem to have raised their profile much. It’s probably because their music skirts that crowded line where hundreds of others sit, thrashing away furiously, shouting about alcohol, sodomy and death. Speaking of death, the Kickers play thrash metal that sits on the death metal side, comprising a true death/thrash synthesis, for whatever that’s worth to you. Now and again a sneaky, snaky, cool thematic lead line will emerge out of these songs, and I like the conviction with which the vocals are spit out, and they’re pretty tight and ferocious…but in the final analysis, it’s competent yet nothing-special sort of stuff. Investigate further only if you must…you gullible metalhead, you. — Friar Wagner