Tag Archives: horns

SKULL441

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PROCLAMATION, Messiah of Darkness and Impurity  (2008, Nuclear War Now! Productions)

The skull:
Here we see a skull transforming from human to goat — be careful, as a full goat skull will disqualify you guys from these halls! Of the three Proclamation skulls in the Skullection, this is the best one. I mean, check out those horns. The two on top seem to be enfolding the darkness, like the arms of a vampire, and that beard is gnarly in all its goatiness. It looks like a waterfall of coarse animal hair. (Do you suppose the word “goatee” came from somebody commenting on another chap’s chin beard, saying, “That chin hair is certainly goaty, sir!”?) And — this is the best part — the skull is growing goat ears. I’ve had goats for real, and those are goat ears if I’ve ever seen goat ears. Of all the skulls I’ve seen with horns, this one is probably the greatest of them all. It’s certainly the goatiest.

The music:
The opening of Messiah of Darkness and Impurity is right off any given early Bathory record. Of course. And while I fully expected Proclamation to continue with their Blasphemy worship on Messiah of Darkness and Impurity and Stuff — and they do to a great degree — there is some evolution here, and that alone is a big surprise. Their sound is still chaotic and frenzied, but the tumult is more focused throughout this album, front-loaded with more brutality and just slightly more modern (it sounds 1996, whereas the first album was more 1990). Though I didn’t hear much Bestial Warlust influence in the first album, I definitely hear it throughout this one. Messiah of Darkness and Impurity and All Kinds of Other Awful Things seems more one-dimensional than its predecessor, with too much emphasis on blasting. That’s all a bunch of hair-splitting, though, because this is still worthy of the Ross Bay Cult and all those who worship Revenge and drink the blood of virgin girls for breakfast and all that fun stuff.
— Friar Wagner

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PROCLAMATION, Advent of the Black Omen  (2006, Nuclear War Now! Productions)

The skull:
Herewith the Council and your friendly Friars do present a special three-skull installment surveying the artwork of Spain’s Proclamation. This is a band the Council are especially fond of, considering their single-minded dedication to the skull. Of their four full-length albums, all feature a skull. Only the fourth one, 2012’s Nether Tombs of Abaddon, disqualifies itself for inclusion into the Skullection, due to the added ribcage and suggestion of a skeleton beyond the skull itself. But let us rejoice in the three covers that have been inducted, the first one being Advent of the Black Omen. Here we see a human skull adorned with massive curled ram-like horns wrapped around the points of a pentagram. Now, according to our sources and statisticians, we do believe we have seen this exact same motif before…we are holding now for confirmation of its unoriginality…and…wait…and…yes, indeed, we have seen this motif here at BDS headquarters, about 187 times, according to our guys in the truck. We appreciate its dedication to tradition, and please note that the inverted crucifixes, complete with inverted Christ, are a relatively innovative touch.

The music:
Given Proclamation’s rather traditional choices in skull cover artwork, and the repetition across their discography of said choices, we can’t act surprised that the band’s music itself is equally derivative. Considering the issuing label and the band’s  image, we should actually hope this sounds a lot like Blasphemy, and sound like Blasphemy it does! Posing in a graveyard, adorned in hundreds of pounds of spikes, chains and molested Catholic crucfixes, this bands look very clearly mirrors their sound:  blasphemous, frightening, obnoxious, oppressive, over-the-top, otherworldly, and, let’s face it, ridiculous. Had they originated this style of metal, it would be a lot more impressive, but considering how many generations removed from the original it is, one can only sit in amazement as it blazes by in its crazed rawness, sounding exactly like the missing link between Fallen Angel of Doom and Gods of War. As the only Friar who very much enjoys Blasphemy, Beherit, Sarcofago and the like, I will always have a soft spot for this sort of blasphemous noise; the aesthetic is appealing, always, but due to its intentionally derivative nature, anything recorded beyond the mid ’90s is caught in a vacuum of diminishing returns.
— Friar Wagner

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EXTIRPATION, Tormentor Supreme Black Katharsis  (2010, Infernal Chaos Productions)

The skull:
Marking our 400th skull in our run up to 666, we can only go with the most bad-ass looking skull in the Skullection. While the fanged lower jaw is fearsome, especially since it’s held in a kind of dish of larger fangs which seem to be ripping the mandible away from the maxilla, it’s the horns that do it. The three pairs of horns are humongous, all twisty and thick, but they don’t look like they’d be good for protection or attack — except for maybe repelling aggressors on the periphery. And, okay, I’m dancing around the true awesomeness here: the two largest horns each have lots of baby horns growing out of them. I’d like to think in 17 years they’ll be mature and as big as the main horns they’re sprouting from, and that this guy will look like a groteseque tangle of tentacled bone that you’d be tempted to shoot at point blank range and put out of his misery. (His neck problems alone would be too much to bear!) Or maybe they’re just little bony spurs or spikes which are dormant and will not get any bigger. I could talk about this skull’s amazing anatomy forever.

The music:
You know there are way, way too many metal bands out there when there are three bands in the 2000s who have recorded material under the name Extirpation. Or, to be less pessimistic:  you know all the good band names are taken when there are three bands who have recorded material under the name Extirpation. So, what does this one-man death/black metal band have to offer besides an amazingly horny skull cover? Would you believe one-man death/black metal? It’s fast as hell, inhumanly so, and that’s why this guy uses a drum machine, because there’s no way a human being could play this, at least not this kind of sustained, unyielding flurry of blasts. And Extirpation really leans more on the death metal side. I can’t help but think of Mortician as this nonsensically-titled album flies by. The drum machine and vocals are dead-ringers for Mortician — I also hear some Von and Pillard-era Incantation in the vocals — but Mortician never utilized the kind of riffing technicality that exists here. It’s not Necrophagist or Obscura technical, but for sick, morbid, ugly, fast-as-shit death metal, the riffs are the only semi-sophisticated thing happening in an otherwise primitive landscape. I enjoy this to some degree, the same part of me that digs Nuclear Death, Rottrevore, Disembowelment and such, but Extirpation are ridiculously one-dimensional and it gets old quickly (like Mortician). You can bet we’re pleased as punch that the one man in this one-man band goes by the name of Skullcrushed.
— Friar Wagner

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ROTTREVORE, Disembodied  (2005, Necroharmonic)

The skull:
This is an appealing piece of skull art, rendered in a semi-Seagrave kind of style, as if the acid Dan took that day was weaker than his usual dose. This isn’t Seagrave at all, as far as I know, but there are some stylistic similarities. Not so much in the skull, but certainly those horn-like, tentacle-ish, large intestine-esque things have a Seagrave sort of flair to them. They’re so cool and trippy that I lose all focus on the skull, who sits there amidst all this stuff going “Hey, what about me???” And he is worth a look, especially those teeth. Might wanna slap a gold grill on those choppers.

The music:
I have always loved Rottrevore at a distance. Their commitment to being the heaviest of the heaviest death metal is appreciated, and I like them a song at a time, but they get dull rather quickly. You have to marvel at the obscene guitar/bass sounds, which combine to resemble a big-ass tractor engine. “Actions for Loss” is a prime example of their approach (and a highly unusual song title for an English-speaking death metal band), as is the entirety of their Copulation of the Virtuous and Vicious 7″. Those songs and more are all here on Disembodied, a collection of demo, EP and compilation tracks from the good old days (early 1990s). I applaud how ridiculously heavy these guys are, and I probably should have picked up this compilation when it was released, because it’s nowhere to be found these days. That way I could live with my decision to sell my Copulation 7″ years ago. I kind of regret that now, because Disembodied is sounding really good at the moment. Oh, wait, I just got bored with them again.
— Friar Wagner

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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

SKULL372

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NOCTURNAL BREED, Triumph of the Blasphemer  (2005, Painkiller)

The skull:
Originally released on the Hammerheart label with a non-skull cover, this version is a 10″ on Painkiller. In one of many skull cover motif subsets, here we have the popular skull-mounted-on-upside-down-cross image. This guy has horns, but they’re dwarfed by monstrous incisors that I understand doubled as kebob skewers. The dude was popular at his friends’ backyard barbeques, and is here immortalized on an inverted crucifix made of pork rib bones. Not sure who the blasphemer is, or what he’s triumphant about.

The music:
These kinds of EPs are usually such a scam. One new song, some live songs, and some covers. Nothing you would ever listen to with any regularity. Nocturnal Breed have long been upholding this very dry, direct, no-nonsense death/thrash attack thing, and they’re very good at it, but every single thing I hear by them fails to stick, even if it sounds okay as it breezes by. They pick out a W.A.S.P. song you don’t often see covered (“I’m Alive”) and a Death song you always see covered (“Evil Dead”). Special mention goes to the song title “Screaming for a Leather Bitch.” Yeah! This reissue adds an extra track with a live version of “Maggot Master.” If that’s enough for you to seek out the Painkiller version in addition to your original Hammerheart version, you’re way more diehard than me, pal, and congratulations on being so committed to leather bitches and maggot masters.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL322

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HELSTAR, Rising From the Grave  (2010, Metal Blade)

The skull:
This bad boy is pretty stock: a horned skull apparently taken from a 9th grader’s notebook cover, its horns wrapped around a five-pointed star. There isn’t much to say about it. Best thing about the cover is it invokes a bit of Texas metal history (“Texas Metal, Est. 1982”) and exalts the fact that Helstar have been at this forever. Which is why they deserve a better album cover than this. It’s not even a real Helstar album, it’s a boxed set, but considering it holds two of their all-time classics…can we get a better cover design for this one please? Dang it. Even as a patch or tshirt or tattoo, I wouldn’t stich it, wear it or have its ink shot into my flesh with a needle. I’m glad I own the two studio albums in question, that way I don’t have to have this low-rent box set artwork littering my racks. Enough of that already.

The music:
This is a box set collecting two Helstar studio albums and a live one: 1988’s A Distant Thunder, 1989’s Nosferatu, and later live album, the clumsily-titled ‘Twas the Night of a Helish X-mas, originally released in 2000 but recorded in the earlier Nosferatu era. Let’s work backwards. With ‘Twas the Night blah blah blah, you can clearly hear that Helstar was an amazing live band back then (as they are now), but you wouldn’t believe it if this was your only evidence. Great performance but a shitty recording and equally disadvantageous mix. It’s far less worthy of being in this box set than Multiples of Black would have been (talk about “rising from the grave”) or of being released as a stand-alone album, as it was in 2000. Ahh, wait…I think I just discovered how Metal Blade solved the problem of getting rid of the last couple thousand they had in their warehouse…clever, guys, very clever.

Nosferatu is an album people have mistaken as a speed/thrash album, and even as a tech/prog album. It doesn’t exactly sit perfectly in those classifications, but they did ramp up the intensity and technicality for Nosferatu, so it certainly touches on those areas. It’s really just a more hi-octane Helstar than what came before, but so fussily questing for perfection that it feels a bit stiff ‘n’ cold in certain moments. That said, some of the band’s most engaging material is here (“Baptized in Blood,” “Harker’s Tale”), and any fan of, you know, metal, should really check it out.

Finally, if you purchase this box set because you love that cover art so much, you better be prepared to spin A Distant Thunder at least 100 times. The first 10 will help you acclimate to it. And least, that’s what I needed, as I found it to have much less instant appeal than their easy-to-get-into first couple albums. It’s not overly complex, certainly not on the Nosferatu level, it’s just not overly direct. It might grab you right away, but it took me years to realize its greatness. Once it took hold, though, it had to share space with Burning Star when considering which Helstar album is best. Stuff like “The King is Dead,” “Abandon Ship” and “Winds of War” are stellar examples of primo Texas epic/power/heavy metal, with the distinctive James Rivera ripping it up on vocals. Unfortunately they chose the wrong song to cover from Scorpions’ Taken By Force. “He’s a Woman (She’s a Man)” is totally out of place on A Distant Thunder; the clear winner would have been “The Sails of Charon,” but they did ask me, did they?
— Friar Wagner

SKULL316

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UNDERGANG, Indhentet Af Doden (2011, Xtreem Music)

The skull:
He so horny! Of all the horned skulls in the Skullection — perhaps our largest subset — Mr. Undergang here is the horniest of them all. I count 12 horns protruding from this guy’s noggin. There’s nearly one horn for every spear plunging into the guy’s head space, 11 spears in fact, and while balance would have been nice at an even 12, they’re doing the job and keeping this gnarly bastard from getting into any more trouble. All manner of wraith-like visages look on, either in amusement or mocking grins, as if to say “not so fast, Horndog!” You get the feeling this guy’s seen better days, falling from grace as a Prince of Hell or a Lord of the Underworld or some such distinction. Here, he’s met his match. Still, one sharp snap of the head to the left or right, you’d think maybe those toothpick-thin spears would be rendered useless. I’d like to imagine Undergang’s next album shows us the next panel in this saga, with Horny breaking free of his bonds and kicking unholy ass on all those wise-ass specters. (It doesn’t, but it does feature about 30 non-horned skulls impaled on spears, so there’s at least some kind of thematic continuity.)

The music:
This album kinda caught fire. It was originally released in 2010 as a promo cassette in a mere 100 copies, but in short order got scooped up by two different labels and, by the next year, was pressed onto vinyl and CD. It seems to have been deserving of all that attention. Undergang have quietly been banging away with some of the most distinctive old-school-esque death metal while everyone else rips off Entombed/Dismember ad nauseam. They take the heavier road, always, mixing the aesthetics of early Napalm Death with the ridiculously bloated churning of bands like Rottrevore and Mortician, all played with the skill of any halfway decent Swedeath practitioner you care to name. Everything is lllooowww as fuck: gruff vocals from way deep down in a pit and an incredibly fat guitar sound like the roar of 15 tractor engines. If you ever wondered what it would sound like if Incantation recorded Bolt Thrower songs in Sunlight Studio with the guy from Pan-Thy-Monium on vocals, here you go.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL200

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MORDARK, Fuerza de la Oscuridad  (2000, self-released)

The skull:
This guy is ready for war. His eyes are piercing and alight with murderous intent. His grin is not one of happiness but of maniacal bloodthirst. (It’s a mouthful of choppers that any dentist would give their lateral incisor to work on.) How can we tell this skull’s up to no good? That ancient battle helmet! We’ll assume the horns are attached to the headpiece, because if they were actually part of his skull, it would be impossible to get that war-cap on his head.

The music:
I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but these Spaniards sound a lot like Tiamat in the Astral Sleep era. Descriptions of them as “black heavy metal” are accurate. The stuff is as angular and poorly recorded as Tiamat’s material from that era, but lacks all the eccentricity and ingenuity. Mordark gets a little more “true metal” sounding at times (the middle of “Almas Negras,” which is like early Slayer meets Iron Maiden, but played very very poorly). This album is generally too clunky and derivative for its own good, but they give it the old college try. They’re onto something, I’m just not sure it would be all that interesting even if it was better written and performed. This recording is from the earlier part of their career, and apparently they’re still around so let’s assume they’ve improved by now…
— Friar Wagner

SKULL180

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DIMMU BORGIR, Gateways  (2010, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
One thing’s for sure: this skull cover matches the music inside…highly-adorned and faked-up with lots of technology. This skull has a couple extra sets of eye sockets above its main ones, and although a lone skull is completely useless as a warrior, it is nonetheless dressed for war here. With a horny (hehe) headpiece, little shield-like things hanging around, and various weird shit scattered around it, it’s probably more ornamental than something actually utile.

The music:
The only Dimmu Borgir song I ever liked was 1997’s “Mourning Palace,” and even that song’s effect wore off after about 5 or 6 listens. Fast forward to 2010 and Dimmu Borgir sounds really, really unappealing. This single, “Gateways,” is more Rammstein than Norwegian black metal in its cold militaristic cadence, and the plastic-y production is terrible:  feather-light guitar sound, repetitive triggered double bass, sampled choir vocals, cheesy synth sounds that are WAY too high in the mix. If Leaves’ Eyes covered newer Immortal songs and Abbath sang guest vocals, it might sound like this, but really, “Gateways” is even worse than that description sounds. I’m not, however, gonna be a retard and say “Dimmu Borgir have lost it!”…because they never had it.
— Friar Wagner