Tag Archives: sand

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VIRGIN KILLER, (2010, demo)

The skull:
This image is actually a little disturbing. It’s so grainy that it pretty much has to be a video screen cap, and although I guess it could be from some corny 70s horror movie, it looks a lot more like something that would have come out of Cambodia during the Pol Pot days. Why is this naked man (or boy?) holding a skull filled with sand, his hands wrapped in chains? Fuck if I know, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know. There’s no way there’s a happy story behind this, but let’s pretend. We’ll say that out of frame, attached to the chains, is the rubber seat of a swing, which this man is going to hang in a tree to delight the village children. But before he hangs it, he’s saying, “Here’s some shaved ice, to beat the heat! It’s lemon flavored. Sorry about the weird bowl, though. I was down in the basement yesterday getting out the Halloween decorations and I found this, so it was clean in the dish drainer today, and I figured I might as well get the most out of it. I promise it’s food safe! And hey, isn’t it funny that in America, it’s cold on Halloween? Not so down here in Colombia! Anyway, eat up, kids, there’s plenty for everyone, and I’ll have this swing up in a jiff!” And the children, living as they do in the peaceful nation of Colombia and knowing nothing of violence or skulls or virgin killing, happily tuck into the shaved ice and squeal with delight at the prospect of the new swing.

The music:
God, not another Colombian speed metal band! What have I done to deserve this? At least it’s not a rehearsal room demo, although probably this was recorded on a Tascam 4-track. In 2010. For fuck’s sake. Anyway, Virgin Killer sound like a really raw tribute to Vendetta or some other decidedly subprime band from Germany in the mid 80s. The vocalist amusingly splits the difference between Schmier and Mille, and again we’re talking 1986 here. This isn’t the worst thing of this sort I’ve ever heard, but it’s definitely pretty bad. Seems like the band got better fairly quickly, though, as their 2013 demo is listenable if still totally goofy. They have the silly energy of a Japanese retro band, where you’re not sure if the whole thing is a joke or not. It’s almost certainly not a joke, but it’s also almost certainly better to treat it as such. For your own sanity.
— Friar Johnsen

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BETRAYED, 1879 Tales of War (1990, Oso)

The skull:
The war in question is the Saltpetre war, which I’m guessing not many people outside of South America have ever heard about, but in short, the war was about control of nitrate deposits in the Atacama desert (hence the sand) and was fought by Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. I doubt the combat involved men racing across the sands on foot firing pistols at their enemies, but you never know. Maybe that’s how it went down, and maybe this is the most historically authentic Big Dumb Skull ever. At the least, it seems likely that this is an original photo for this album, which makes it the first classic snap-a-shot-of-a-real-skull BDS in a long time. Well played, Betrayed.

The music:
I was going to say that Betrayed play thrash like high schoolers, but then I remembered that Death Angel were just kids when they recorded The Ultra-Violence, so I guess Betrayed play like grade schoolers. That alone would only make them medium bad on the broad spectrum of old thrash quality, though. It’s the vocals that really push Betrayed into the red. The “singing” here kinda sounds like Snake doing an interview, or Tom G. Warrior in “Mesmerized” if he sounded a little less like a haunted house ghost. It’s a weirdly accented Sprechgesang. Betrayed wear their influences on their sleeves, too: a Voivod riff here, a Kreator knick there, Metallica throughout. There’s not an original (or good) idea to be had here, and to boot the playing and production are terrible. The only people who would like this are the guys who only listen to shit no one else has heard of. If you’re one of those dudes, then Betrayed just might become your new favorite band.
— Friar Johnsen

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WHITE SKULL, Under This Flag (2012, Dragonheart)

The skull:
If you were met on the field of battle by an army of zombies bearing a giant fucking skull flag, you’d crap your pants and die on the spot. And that’s before the skulls in berets showed up. In the end, this particular branch of special forces was disbanded because by the time they showed up, everyone was already dead. Sometimes, a skull is just too badass.

The music:
White Skull are a fairly terrible Italian power metal band who just won’t go away. They’ve got about 600 albums, and they’re all bad. The thing that sets them apart from most terrible Italian power metal bands (which are legion) is singer Federica de Boni, who is like a female Chris Boltendahl, and evidently the only thing that’s worse than Boltendahl’s voice is his womanly equivalent’s. The music is reasonably well played, I guess, but the riffing is so fucking generic and uninspired that it almost makes me long for the comparative mastery of Hammerfall. To top it all off, Under This Flag boasts the sound of a mid 90s Underground Symphony album. It’s rotten all around, and to be avoided.
— Friar Johnsen

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RUNNING WILD, First Years of Piracy (1991, Noise)

The skull:
At first I thought, “Oh, come on. By the time the scalp and hair rotted away, that bandana would be MUCH looser around the skull’s dome…” before I started to wonder if maybe this guy wasn’t in fact killed by an overtight bandana. Think about it, you’re on the open seas, the wind in your face, and your stupid mandatory headgear is constantly blowing off. So, you tie it on really fucking tight, so tight that not even gale force winds could knock it off, and the next thing you know, you’re dying of gangrene because you cut off the circulation to the top of your noggin. Sounds pretty fucking stupid, until you hear that this guy lost an eye trying to balance a rapier on his nose. Kids: don’t make bets when you’re getting double rum rations.

The music:
Generally speaking, it never pays to re-record old songs. For one, there’s always a certain spark that’s lost with the benefit of hindsight, an ineffable youthful energy that’s nearly impossible to summon at will years later. But more than that, by the time an band has accumulated sufficient fans and marketplace goodwill to get away with a release like this, the band is usually well past its prime. But Running Wild were near the top of their game in 1991 when they decided to revive these tunes from their first three albums. Rolf and company released one of their best original albums in the same year, Blazon Stone and were only a couple years from the creative peak of Death or Glory. So, it can’t be said that the band were on the wrong side of the curve when they undertook this project. But then, it can’t really be said that those first three albums were really so raw and underproduced that they needed to be revisited this way. I just recently listened to Gates of Purgatory and was impressed anew at just how tight the band was. Sure, Rolf’s voice hadn’t quite hit its stride, but the playing and production were otherwise just fine. The most shocking thing about that very first Running Wild album is how thrashy it sounds in retrospect; it has a lot more in common with Bathory than probably most people would think. Then again, Rolf’s did improve immensely in those seven crucial years, so for sure he sounds better on “Prisoner of Our Time” and “Soldiers in Hell”. There’s less of an improvement, though, for the tunes from Under Jolly Roger, which was actually only four years old at that point. That fact alone reminds me of how fast-paced the early metal scene was. Nowadays, a band re-recording a four year old song might be doing it on the very next album from the original! But, I digress. First Years of Piracy is inessential, but it’s also quite good and serves as an excellent best-of from the early days of the band, and probably served the intended function of defining the canonical early tunes that one could expect at a Running Wild show in the early 90s, but owning this will only make you want the original albums the more, and if you have them already, are you really going to spend much time with the rerecorded versions? Unless you derive some perverse titilation in the disgusting triggered snare sound that was the Running Wild calling card in 1991, then probably not.
— Friar Johnsen