SKULL659

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

SEOL, Üdvözlégy a Seolban (2007, demo)

The skull:
Is that a horn or… what is that? What the fuck is wrong with this skull? Is that just a massive third eye socket or something? Is this the skull of a deformed monster? The bed of leaves he’s sitting on and the nicely arranged candles make me think of some ridiculously decorated table at a holiday party. But not Halloween. That would be too obvious. I think it’s probably Thanksgiving, and the hostess who conjured this bizarre tablescape happens to hate all of her guests, with a deep and pervasive loathing, and she can’t wait until she pulls off the skull’s top to reveal the boiled organ meat inside which is the one and only course at dinner.

The music:
The only Seol music I could find is a couple of tracks on the band’s long-abandoned Myspace page, and hilariously, they’re both intros, including the intro to this demo. I love the idea that back in the heyday of Myspace (or at least back in 2007 when this demo came out and Myspace wasn’t completely irrevelant), Seol figured that a minute and a half of slowed-down sound effects and moaning was a good introduction to the band for curious listeners. Then again, it’s pretty clear from just those intros that Seol are a shitty low-fi black metal band, and maybe that’s all the info their theoretical potential fans would need to become interested. While I applaud the audacity of that assumption, I can’t say that I’ve been converted to the Seol cause by some spooky wind noises, but your mileage may vary.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL535

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

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

SKULL385

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Friar Johnsen

THE GATES OF SLUMBER, The Wretch (2011, Rise Above)

The skull:
This is just a beautiful cover. An ancient skull, rotting like old wood, shrouded in shadow and cradled in leaves. The blue/green palate is mysterious, almost poisonous, and the simple scene conveys perfectly the sort of eldritch malice I think the band was hoping to evoke. If all skull covers were like this, we’d have to take the “dumb” out of Big Dumb Skulls. Fortunately for us, almost none of them are.

The music:
As regular readers of this site will know, I’m not much of a fan of Sabbath-style doom metal, but that’s exactly what The Gates of Slumber play, and I’m alright with it. I couldn’t tell you why this band is good when all those others are not. Maybe it’s because I saw them a couple times in tiny rooms and they seemed like cool dudes. Maybe it’s because a good friend of mine loves them so much that his affection has rubbed off on me. Maybe it’s because they’re obsessed with Conan and the other classics of swords-and-sorcery pulp fiction. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s their awesome cover art. While The Wretch is their best cover, for obvious reasons, most of their art is spectacular. Anyway, who cares? I don’t have to explain my random shitty taste to you! Suck it. The Wretch is the the band’s full-length (forever – they’ve recently broken up) and it’s their best, although all their albums are more or less the same mix of early Sabbath and slow trad metal. The vocals are the worst part; they’re badly doubled in that typical doom metal way, and Karl Simon’s voice wouldn’t be particularly interesting in the best possible presentation, but I’m somehow able to forgive them, or at least ignore them, long enough to just dig on the riffs and the atmosphere, which is heavy and unpretentious. It’s probably for the best these guys called it quits. They never really changed, and while they always got a little better from album to album, there’s clearly a limit to how far this sort of thing can be taken, and maybe they found it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL167

Posted on June 16, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

LEGACY OF HATE, Unmitigated Evil (2008, Maintain)

The skull:
There’s something off about the dimensions of this skull that makes me think it’s perhaps supposed to be a child’s. I guess plopping a kid’s skull in a pile of bones (or whatever) is pretty evil, although if that evil were totally unmitigated, I imagine there’d probably be a whole lot more skulls. And probably less foliage, which isn’t very evil at all.

The music:
Googling for information about this band, I turned up a lot of heavy metal references to “legacy of hate,” the phrase. It’s a Fight song. It’s a Celesty album. It’s a Hellfighter (aka: the singer from Xentrix’s band) single. And, of course, it’s this Austrian band. Usually when that sort of thing happens, it turns out the phrase is the title of a book or movie, or was part of some famous speech, but I can’t seem to find the source (unless all these groups were fans of the 60s TV western The Virginian), so I’m just going to assume that this is a phrase so utterly generic that it’s been coined dozens of times. Which is to say, it’s absolutely perfect for a band with a big dumb skull cover. Legacy of Hate are a melodic death metal band that are neither bad nor at all noteworthy. Just the same thing you’ve heard countless times before, done better and worse. They’re from Austria, but though I usually expect an off-kilter oddness from Austrian metal bands, Legacy of Hate don’t have a measure of quirk to spare. Straight up and down, these guys. If you love the first albums by In Flames and Dark Tranquillity, then you probably won’t dislike Legacy of Hate, but you’re almost certainly bored by the myriad bands who have tried to reinvent that wheel over the last 15 years or so, so while Legacy of Hate might pass the time inoffensively, that’s about as good as it’s gonna get.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL124

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Friar Wagner

SKULLTORCH, demo (2007)

The skull:
It would seem this skull is floating in a forest in autumn, with leaves actively falling across his brow. And he looks pretty pissed off about the situation. Very simple black and white, with a totally generic logo at the top. The skull is not even mounted on top of a torch or anything. Maybe he’s on a quest for the torch, roaming through dense endless forests, and when he finds it in the castle the reunion will be glorious and many elves and dwarves will come together to celebrate the completeness of skulltorch and all will be joyous in the kingdom.But it’s probably just another ill-conceived album cover from a band that lacks a bit of vision.

The music:
This Belgian band haven’t followed up this utterly forgettable four-song demo yet, so we’re going on six years there. Not surprising, as they really had nothing important to say in the first place. It doesn’t get much more boring than this: Pantera-influenced groove metal punctuated with the kind of mid-paced death metal Unleashed were doing around the time of the Warrior album or what Gorefest started doing on False and Soul Survivor. But see, that makes Skulltorch sound almost good, and they’re not. While the drummer is clearly talented, the two-chord chug riffs and even some of the vocal patterns are not that far from nu-metal level inanity. I’ll take a pass and hope that someday one of these modern metal bands with a skull cover on their demo will be totally amazing.
— Friar Wagner