Tag Archives: third eye

SKULL479

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FILTHEATER/ISHIMURA,Rites of Contempt and Disgust (2011, Speed Ritual)

The skull:
This is at least the third time we’ve seen a skull by this artist. He also did SKULL143 and SKULL396, and this one is every bit as good as those. I love the detailed linework that somehow conveys real hopelessness and despair. No mean feat! The pile of handmeat is of course great (especially how the fingers suggest spider legs), but for me, the real clincher to this piece is the half-closed third eye. That eye is so jaded that no depravity is sufficiently titilating anymore, and I daresay that heavy-lidded ennui is perfectly suited to this particular collection of songs.

The music:
Filtheater scored a surprisingly good review from Friar Wagner when they last appeared in the Skullection, but an unconditional love for Nuclear Death is not a prerequisite in aspiring Friars, so while I owned Bride of Insect as a young man, and appreciated it for its shock value (which is still strong, I must admit), I never really liked their music, nor of course their sub-basement production values. And honestly, I don’t recall much about them, so I’m taking it on faith that Filtheater bear some similarity. I guess I can get behind the more angular and weird riffs on display here, but the blasty bits are a sloppy mess and the songs overall don’t seem to have any overarching raison d’etre. Grimy grindcore for horror crusties. And Ishimura is way, way fucking worse. Their drummer, when he blasts, seems to have no control over himself, and as such ends up seemingly out of time with the rest of the band, although maybe that’s by design. And for as shitty as Filtheater’s distorted growls are, the vocals on Ishimura’s half of this split are infinitely shittier. It’s also not clear to me that either band has a bass player, so thin and reedy is the sound on both halves. Friar Wagner can keep this stuff. What I need is some crappy 80s power metal. That’ll sort me out.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL384

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P.L.F., Pulverizing Lethal Force  (2008, Obsessed With Wickedness)

The skull:
Here he is, the Skullmaster General, complete with all-seeing third eye and spike-laden battle helmet! He comes flanked by his rat minions, who will eat anything Skullmaster General does not. The ulna bones (or maybe femur bones) are apparently the remains of a recent meal. At least, that’s what I’m going with. It’s unclear whether they belong to the skull, and they can’t possibly be from the rats. And maybe those rats are actually opossums, judging from their snout. Holy shit, with a scene like this and these sorts of bad-ass characters roaming the nether-regions, anything’s possible!

The music:
17 songs in 20 minutes, woo-hoo! Originally released with a non-skull cover, Obsessed With Wickedness put things to rights and reissued it a year later with this album cover. So, are P.L.F. actually a pulverizing lethal force? They’re definitely pulverizing. “Lethal” is probably open to interpretation, but I’ll give them lethal. This is some incredibly ferocious and energetic death-leaning grindcore. A prerequisite for this sort of thing is total power and, at its very foundations, P.L.F. deliver on “lethal.” A “force” would be like a Napalm Death or even a Nasum, so I’m not sure grind clones like these guys would qualify as a “force.” But that’s really reading way too much into music that’s supposed to be of-the-moment. Here today, gone tomorrow, just like most halfway decent grindcore bands. I’ll admit that P.L.F., while not exactly a force, are just a notch above “halfway decent.” If you dig this stuff, you’ll love it. I’ll stick with Terrorizer and prime-era Napalm Death, because my attention span for this kind of thing is very short beyond the godfathers of the style. Funny little note: Before this album the P.L.F. stood for the apparently ironic Pretty Little Flower. Taking a page out of the Summertime Daisies book, eh guys?
— Friar Wagner

SKULL321

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SICKBAG, Shades Among Shades (2010, Destructure)

The skull:
Although there are too many textures going on here, this is a pretty nice cover. Classy, even. Which seems inappropriate for a band called Sickbag. The skull is artfully rendered, looking a little like an engraving at first glance, but made up of much curvier lines on close inspection. The third eye is a nice touch, too. And while it’s a little hard to say for sure, I guess that fluff near the bottom could be skullvomit. There’s no sickbag to be seen, but I guess you gotta start with the puke, right?

The music:
Sickbag sound like maybe they started out playing modern Napalm Death style grind before calming down a little and settling into abrasive midpaced death metal. Dissonant chording and some angular plodding also call to mind Gojira at their least accessible (so, around From Mars to Sirius). There’s a thick grime of fuzz over everything here, from the guitars to the vocals, that I find very unpleasant, and even minus this effect the vocals would be generic and offputting, but the songwriting, for this style, is reasonably solid. The occasional ambitious reach (for instance, the increasingly messy drum intro to “…for the weak”) generally falls flat, but I do like the creativity at least hinted by those attempts. Sickbag need to tighten everything up a bit, and change their name, but they at least have some potential.
— Friar Johnsen

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VADER, Future of the Past (1996, Koch)

The skull:
Now THAT is an evil, scary fucking skull. It looks to be maybe a long dead bride, her veil decayed to tatters. Vader’s art is usually terrible, which makes this one all the more extraordinary. It’s a beautiful, sinister painting that’s pretty much snark-proof, and I really can’t think of anything bad to say about it. There’s a first time for everything, I guess!

The music:
I bought the first Vader album when it came out, but that was getting to the end of my “everything on Earache is awesome” phase, and the album didn’t do much for me. I would hear more Vader from time to time, particularly when I was writing the zine, but it still never grabbed me, and honestly I didn’t even know this album existed. Why they felt the need to release a full-length covers album with only two original albums under their belt is a bit of a mystery, but there you go. It’s kind of quaint how on-the-nose the list of songs is, with Sodom, Kreator, Possessed, Celtic Frost, and Terrorizer, Slayer, Dark Angel and Black Sabbath, and then a few obligatory oddities, namely tunes by Anti-Nowhere League (whom Sodom themselves also covered) and every death metal band’s favorite synthpop band, Depeche Mode. It was them or Ultravox, I guess. Today, any band making an album like this would be falling over themselves trying to out-underground everyone else, and the tracklist would be demo and single tracks from bands you never heard of. And that would be okay, because at least the covers, when they’re played this plainly and without much interpretation, might open a window to new avenues of musical exploration. But, everyone’s already heard “Outbreak of Evil” and “Silent Scream” and no one’s discovering anything new from this album. Vader’s versions of these songs are as you’d expect: more or less straight renditions, played with Vader’s usual precision, and in general a little faster. There’s something lost, though, when you play early Sodom and Kreator with too much competence, so those tracks suffer accordingly from Vader’s skill. The Depeche Mode tune (“I Feel You”) has a moany industrial vibe and is fairly bad. It was wise of the band to not follow this path any further. There’s a version of the disc with KAT cover, and it would have been cool to hear Vader paying tribute to their countrymen, but I couldn’t find that track, sadly. Anyway, for a death metal covers album, Future of the Past is pretty good. Better than a lot of Vader albums, at least, but really no more essential.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL229

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THE CHASM, Procession to the Infraworld (2000, Dwell)

The skull:
I suppose this could be a trick of perspective, where a human-sized skull is very close and merely appears to be floating at the center of a nebula, but I think it’s more likely we’re to believe the skull is actually big enough to fill that glowing interstellar cloud of gas and dust, spanning many hundreds of light years. That would make this, easily, the biggest dumb skull we’ve ever encountered in art before. His massive forehead is cracked open to reveal a third eye which itself must be larger than the largest stars. If this guy is at the gate of the infraworld, you’re gonna need some serious sci-fi shit onboard your spacecraft to escape his almost unimaginable gravity. And god help you if that third eye shoots laser beams, as I presume it must! Normally, The Council frowns upon skeletons, but the ban on skeletons is primarily meant to apply to the actual big dumb skull. The two skinny guys here are effectively adornment to the title typography, and so are allowed.

The music:
Mixing Morbid Angel style DM with thrash and black elements, and with a melodic sensibility not unlike early Dark Tranquillity, The Chasm are one of the few extreme bands mixing so many sounds who also do it convincingly. There’s some absolutely crazy riffing on Procession to the Underworld, and some gonzo drumming, and it’s all performed honestly, with a rawness that charms by comparison with today’s ultra-quantized, mercilessly-edited death metal. Back in my zine days, when this album came out, I got a promo copy and I remember thinking it was way better than the logo and art would suggest, but I guess in the crush of free stuff I got back then, I never got around to buying a proper copy or keeping up with the (still-active) band, even despite seeing them live a couple times. This was probably a mistake, as I’ve thoroughly enjoyed revisiting The Chasm and am newly impressed by the passion and even originality on display here.
— Friar Johnsen