SKULLFATHER, Order of the Skull (2008, self-released)

The skull:
A garden variety skull photo, limned in red, and framed by a terribly ugly and distorted, tattoo-parlor olde English typeface for the logo and title. What else is there to say? The Council does commend Skullfather for the singularity of their commitment to the skull. It’s in their name, their demo title, and on the cover. A trifecta! But, we’ve seen some variation on this cover several times since Big Dumb Skulls was launched, and we’re hardly one-fifth of the way through all the skulls collected by The Council. It’s gonna be a long couple of years, I think.

The music:
One man, bedroom Entombed worship. And not even the good stuff, but the watered-down, post-death rock throwback stuff from the mid 00s. Then again, maybe Skullfather isn’t an Entombed clone, but a Desultory clone. Double meaning! Allx (sic), the presumed Skullfather, does a pretty good job emulating the Sunlight Studios guitar tone, but his songs are boring, his vocals unimpressive, and his drum programming pedestrian. I guess even Allx was bored with this shit, because he only produced these four songs before his one man band broke up. I won’t miss them.
— Friar Johnsen

NILE, Festivals of Atonement (1995, Anubis Music)

The skull:
Straight outta some book Karl Sanders found at the library, with the yellow cranked to maximum, for some reason. Sure, it’s a nice looking skull, big and dumb, nestled in a cozy niche, but what does it have to do with festivals of atonement? Maybe festivals in ancient Egypt were very different from what I’m imagining.

The music:
This was Nile’s first self-released EP, and as such, they sound even more like Morbid Angel than they did when they became death metal famous. There are some intros with the eastern scales that Karl Sanders later made his stock in trade, but in the main, Morbid Angel + Suffocation more or less sums this up. I dig the dirgey “Wrought”, which features some passably good semi-melodic vocals and a rather ridiculous synth flute solo, and the equally draggy “Extinction” is also pretty cool. The faster numbers don’t interest me as much, but at least Nile at this point in time weren’t obsessed with proving how fast or evil (or whatever) they were, which increasingly became the case with their albums. This is just not my speed when it comes to death metal, but for such an early recording, it’s pretty obvious that this was a band who had their shit together far more than most bands do at that stage. This EP was later reissued with 1997’s Ramses Bringer of War as In the Beginning, and nowadays the band affects (for some reason) to describe their Egyptophile music as “Ithyphallic metal,” which is insanely pretentious (and borderline nonsensical), but if you just read that as “Ichthyphallic metal,” it’s all worth it.
— Friar Johnsen

NIGHTSTALKER, Superfreak (2009, Meteor City)

The skull:
Sepia-toned, a smallish skull in the middle of a some kind of sunburst pattern, set with retro typefaces that scream, “Are you ready to rock… and trip BALLS?” There are all kinds of little embellishments in the margins of the cover that do nothing but muddy the pristine laziness of the design. Who associates skulls with superfreaks, anyway? “Alas, poor Rick James! I knew him, Horatio.” Google “skull album cover” and you’ll be surprised how many are out there, ready to buy, with text like, “BAND LOGO HERE” helpfully set in the mockup. All those covers look basically like this one.

The music:
Stoner rock of the Monster Magnet variety. What’s to add? You can hear it in your head already. Some fuzz bass, some Orange amps, some nasal midrange crooning, some tambourines, some cowbell, some lyrics that include the word “mama”. There’s a stereotype of the stoner who’s just too burned out to know what’s going on around him, or to give a shit. This is the musical expression of that stereotype. “Is this a… what day is this? Is this Nightstalker? Whatever, man.” Yeah.
— Friar Johnsen