CRADLE TO GRAVE, CTG (2004, Year of the Sun)

The skull:
Fire and ice, baby! Fire and ice! The purity of vision here is to be commended: black background, skull, illegible logo on forehead, nothing else. The flames look they were created by following the instructions in the first link returned by Googling, “photoshop fire”, but otherwise, this is a finely crafted BDS.

The music:
Filed under “groove metal” in Metal Archives, this is one of those bands who sound immediately familiar, yet it’s impossible to say who they sound like. I think this is because people of taste generally don’t listen to any bands like this on purpose, and yet we encounter them all the time, as the first opening band of a six band touring package, or drifting out of Hot Topic as we walk past on our way to the food court while Christmas shopping. Terrible tough-guy vocals distract from some occasionally decent riffing, but the grey, midpaced monotony of the songwriting makes it rather hard to sit through more than a track or two before the mind starts to wander. I am not inspired to pursue their discography any further, and if they produce another big dumb skull as choice as CTG‘s, I’ll give Friar Wagner a chance to cut his teeth on Cradle to Grave.
– Friar Johnsen