SKULL49

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

APOLION, Death Grows Into Sperm (2009, Bylec Tum)

The skull:
Have I died and gone to Hell? What great deed have I done to deserve so sublimely ridiculous a skull as this? Although the hallmark of the average Big Dumb Skull is a wanton disregard for the theme of the album’s title, in this rare instance, the two coexist in blissful, skullacious harmony. Death grows into sperm. Calvariam cum flagellum. A screaming skullatozoa. Whispy lines framing the skull suggest seminal fluid, and the bluish hue recalls the hazy glow of the ultrasound machine. A tour de force of conceptual unity! It is preferred, of course, that skulls face forward, but here, the orientation is key to the overall composition, and the Council could not be more pleased.

The music:
Apolion is Michele Ricci, who endearingly (and atypically) foregoes a psyeudonym, and Death Grows Into Sperm is surprisingly decent for a one man black metal project. I’m not the foremost expert on the genre, but I hear a mix of Dark Medieval Times and Worship Him, especially in the Vorphalackian vocals and the groovy midpaced sections. Most songs are generally uptempo but not fully blasty, tempered by the occasional clean guitar section, tastefully played. The production is good, perhaps over-clean, and I believe that not only are the drums programmed, but the bass as well, which is amusing. Speaking of midi: I never fully approve of sequenced drums, but they sound extra-wrong in black metal, where the push and pull of a mediocre drummer playing faster than his abilities allow is one of the signature elements of the style. The mechanized precision of the drum machine brings order at the expense of a very necessary chaos. Maybe Apolion would be a little better, or at least more authentic, if Ricci tapped them out in real time on his keyboard. But then again, maybe it’s best that he quit while he was ahead.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL48

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Friar Wagner

MALEFICIO, Under the Black Veil (2008, Hateworks)

The skull:
Under a gloriously unreadable logo flies a skull, seemingly blasted out of a cannon into the yellow glow of dawn. Or perhaps it’s an LSD-influenced vision by the same artist who conceived the band logo, the skull an illusion created by the dense cloud formation, although what this all has to do with being under a black veil is not entirely clear.

The music:
Unless somebody’s pulling our leg, this Swedish band released 18 demos between 1991 and 2004, and have experimented with their death/black/thrash metal formula by occasionally mixing in flutes and violins. So what we get on their 2008 debut full-length should be astoundingly good and focused, right? Well, it’s just kinda average. Reasonably well-executed death/black metal with some thrashy hints, reminding of the days when bands like Mayhem, Cradle of Filth and Impaled Nazarene weren’t exclusively black metal, but a hodgepodge of sub-genre intersections. What’s even more incredible is not that Maleficio have stuck with it for so long with very little reward, but the fact that they’re one of the only long-running Swedish extreme metal bands where the members aren’t also in 10 other bands. It’s kind of amazing, considering the band’s longevity, but the eight songs here are uninteresting and rather faceless, lacking any sort of individual character, just like the skull that graces the cover.
–Friar Wagner

SKULL47

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

HYPOCRISY, Into the Abyss (2000, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
A dirty, jawless skull in the crosshairs of some kind of reticle, or possibly trapped in a game of Tempest, either emanating or absorbing some weak-looking lightning bolts, and floating over a background of… some brown junk? Dirty pipes or something? Who knows. A skull this lazy just doesn’t have the energy to explain his environment. He’s like, “Man, what do you want from me? I don’t get a say here. I needed some money quick to take care of some shit, and they’re like, ‘Just go float over there, by the red glow,’ and I’m like, whatever, dudes. When do I get paid?”

The music:
If ever a band deserved such a nondescript cover, it was Hypocrisy in the early 00s. Not that their music was terrible or anything, but the meat-and-potatoes death metal with keyboards thing they were peddling at this time was pretty damned uninspired. They had gotten past the “we’re so fucking evil and brutal” out of their system fairly early, and the style of the slow and odd “Fourth Dimension” (my personal favorite Hypocrisy album) evidently didn’t have any staying power. When they settled into the mid-paced middle of their career, it was clear they didn’t really have any particularly good ideas, so they just went with the death metal trends of the day and played the basketball beat over a dozen interchangeable, trebly, black-metal style riffs played high on the fretboard. That is, when they weren’t striving for some buzzy groove, which mainman Peter Tägtgren’s signature ultra-high-gain production rendered in the least comfortable tones possible. It was never really awful listening to Hypocrisy, but it was rarely any fun.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL46

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Friar Wagner

SEVERE TORTURE, Sworn Vengeance (Earache, 2007)

The skull:
There’s so little to look at here, the attention is immediately drawn to the missing front tooth. Makes this person look a lot dumber than he/she probably was while living. The eye sockets are huge, as is the nasal hole. The skull has a slightly worried or fearful look, but maybe that’s just the imagination running wild after having to contemplate such a simplistic album cover design. Yet another tossed off “uh, how about a skull” sort of cover. Big and dumb, but even we here at BDS demand a little more imagination than this.

The music:
Faster than your usual Dutch death metal (which often has a lot of love for the slower paces of doom), and very U.S. sounding, which is probably exactly what they’re going for. Some similarities to countrymen Sinister, but even more generic. Well-played, no doubt, and doing absolutely nothing that hasn’t been done to death before. This would blow your ass away if you hadn’t already heard hundreds of death metal bands and thousands of death metal albums over the years. So, one for the new kids I suppose. Zzzzzz….
–Friar Wagner

Hey, any of these songs would have fit nicely on the classic Grind Crusher compilation, so at least it fits under the label’s general umbrella.

SKULL45

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

REPUGNANT, Hecatomb (1999, To The Death)

The skull:
Small, but feisty, this little guy looks a bit cracked up and leers dumbly at you with his one eye. While the Council ordinarily disqualifies skulls that are obviously a part of a larger skeleton, the tiny fragment of spine, unencumbered by shoulder blades or any other bony bits, was found to not distract from the centrality of the skull. Considering the emptiness of the cover, it is felt that the skull could have been bigger, but since “hecatomb” originally meant the sacrificial slaughter of 100 cattle, the dumbness of this singular skull compensated for its meager smallness.

The music:
Formed in 1998, Repugnant more or less labored in obscurity, but if they had been formed a decade earlier, they would have been immediately signed to Earache, sounding as they do on this EP like a cross between Nihilist and Terrorizer (in their less blasty moments), with dashes of early Death and Celtic Frost. Considering how well worn this territory was then and continues to be, Repugnant pull it off with striking conviction and integrity. The production is raw, and certainly evocative of the era Hecatomb means to recall, but it’s also not off-puttingly retro or lo-fi. The drumming is lively and competent in a modern sense, without affecting the old-school sound of the beats. Amusingly, singer and guitarist Mary Goore was also in the retro sleaze metal act Crashdïet, which shows that as a heavy metal nostalgia hound, his tastes run the gamut. As long as the style is outdated, he’s into it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL44

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Friar Wagner

BENEDICTION, Killing Music (Nuclear Blast, 2008)

The skull:
This version of Killing Music finds the skull with sonic waves entering its non-ears to process with its non-existent brain. There’s a better version out there somewhere showing the skull wearing headphones. This version is sans cans, unfortunately. Skull itself looks like it was made via papier mache, there’s sheet music behind it (wonder if it’s scored Benediction music, how delightful!), and that awesomely tacky/cool Benediction logo big and fat on top. Hopefully he’s listening to earlier Benediction, which is quite a bit better than the later stuff. But who knows, his droopy sockets make him look kinda sad.

The music:
This band needs a t-shirt that says “Running on Auto-Pilot Since 1995!” Or “With Every New Album, an Uglier Album Cover!” (Except this one, which we’ve already determined is ace.) Yep, Benediction have outstayed their welcome, adding nothing to their once enjoyable Massacre-meets-Bolt Thrower formula. Killing Music is generic through and through. Something like “Beg, You Dogs” is pretty awful: assembly-line riffs and vocals that give a bad name to death metal vocalists in its stupidity (like his stupid delivery of equally stupid lyrics like “I fuck your wife and sanity.”) I recommend The Grand Leveler and Dark is the Season EP, the latter boasting one of the heaviest guitar tones ever recorded, which is especially crushing on their cover of Anvil’s “Forged in Fire.” As for this, it’s irrelevant bargain bin death metal. Except for the great/funny artwork.
–Friar Wagner

SKULL43

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

WE BUTTER THE BREAD WITH BUTTER, We Butter The Bread With Butter (2007, demo)

The skull:
Looking like a blacklight poster for the swoop haircut set, this colorful cover features (most of) a large anatomical-style drawing of a skull framed by some flowery pastel border. There’s a bit of jaw visible at the bottom, but this was ruled a reflection of a single big dumb skull, and not a second, disqualifying skull. Really, this would be a pretty excellent big dumb skull cover, excelling in both bigness and dumbness, it weren’t claimed by some braindead fucking deathcore band.

The music:
Just about the only thing worse than deathcore is rap metal. Stale knockoffs of In Flames riffs combined with mosh breakdowns that would embarrass the worst band signed to Victory Records in 1997, all played by kids who hang out at the mall, deathcore is an assult on all the senses. We Butter The Bread With Butter’s scant claim to fame is that they added garish keyboards and electronics to the mix, vilely presaging the abomination known as Nintendocore (along with crabcore, the most awful of the many minimicrosubgenres of deathcore). About the only thing I can say in We Butter The Bread With Butter’s deathcore defense is that they don’t employ the good cop/bad cop vocals popularized by Killswitch Engage, but the all-death vocals they do employ are Chris Barnes-level shitty. Really, the only thing worse than having to listen to this is the indignity of having to type “We Butter The Bread With Butter” five times.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL42

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Friar Wagner

SKULL, You’re Dead (1990, demo)

The skull:
Simple stuff: a wrecked-looking, blinding white skull on black. Has the added appeal of what look like two black guns shoved straight into the eye sockets. Poor guy, he’s not only already dead but apparently couldn’t afford dental insurance while living. That’s some serious bad luck shit right there.

The music:
Second band called Skull for Big Dumb Skulls, this one slightly better known than the Polish band (see Skull13). This Skull is from Sweden, and they feature a former member of Morbid and also have the distinction of appearing on one of the very few metal compilation releases to covet, Projections of a Stained Mind (incidentally, that cover also features a skull). Skull only recorded one demo, and You’re Dead is certainly interesting. It’s only Swedish Death Metal by proxy, because while the guitar tones reminds of early Tiamat and the delivery is fairly demented with very competent performances, Skull are a whole other beast. There’s a strong influence of something that reminds of GBH meets The Accused, and with the chaotic, just-about-ready-to-explode vibe, especially some of the vocals, it’s very hard not to like.
–Friar Wagner

SKULL41

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

ARCH ENEMY, Doomsday Machine (2005, Century Media)

The skull:
A dusty, aged-looking skull, missing a tooth and looking quite tough, haloed by a biomechanical representation of Arch Enemy’s circle-with-four-protrusions symbol, the whole assemblage floating over the most generic industrial-looking backdrop you can imagine. I interviewed Mike Amott when Stigmata came out, and he vaguely alluded to a secret meaning behind the symbol, a meaning which he vowed to never disclose. I found that fairly annoying, and have never made any further effort to learn if he kept that promise. I always assumed it had something to do with the (then) four members of the band, but of course after Johan Liiva left, the band became a five piece. If there is a meaning to it, it’s almost surely far less clever than Amott imagined, which brings us back to this skull. Is this halo/collar supposed to be the doomsday machine? If so, can it really be considered as such if you need to clamp it on to every person you want to doom? This is not how mad science works. As always with this sort of Photoshop art, the various elements don’t quite look like they inhabit the same space, but the skull itself if pleasingly big and undeniably the focus of the cover.

The music:
I love the first couple Arch Enemy discs to death. They’re exactly the blend of Carcass-style melody and Carnage-style aggression that we all wanted from Mike Ammot, who was mostly just dicking around in Spiritual Beggars at the time. (No slam on Spiritual Beggars, though — as stoner/psych metal goes, they’re about as good as it gets.) But even by the third album, the melody/brutality balance was falling out of whack. When Liiva left and Angela Gossow joined, it felt like the band decided to leverage the appeal of their attractive singer to create the most marketable death metal band possible. It’s not that their albums immediately got bad – they didn’t. But, while Black Earth and Stigmata felt like the heavy albums Ammot really wanted to make, the Gossow albums, pretty much all of them, feel like the heavy albums Ammot is obligated to make. His death metal day job. The confrontational spirit of the earlier albums, a spirit pretty much essential to good death metal, more or less vanished, and the rough edges were mercilessly sanded down. All of the Gossow albums would be better with a melodic singer. They’re no more death metal than, say, Nevermore. In fact, death vocals be damned, on average there’s considerably less aggression on display in these latter-day Arch Enemy albums than in all but the weakest Nevermore discs. So while Doomsday Machine has more than its fair share of killer riffs (the ending of the title track is pretty awesome), and even some very well assembled songs, the vibe is just somehow off. This album just doesn’t rile me up the way Black Earth does, to this day, and Gossow’s over-effected and bland, if serviceable, vocals (say what you will about Liiva, he has an unmistakable voice) utterly fail to sell the evil. The super slick production doesn’t help either. Daniel Erlandsson (always the lesser Erlandsson), can blast in time, sure, but the mix utterly tames these supposedly furious beats. Is it painful to listen to Doomsday Machine? Not at all. Just pointless.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL40

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Friar Wagner

The skull:
As a piece of “art,” this cover is freaking horrible. As a skull cover, we give it major props. We have a real skull grinning a stupid grin (the missing tooth indicates this skull may have belonged to a redneck), with some creature’s (or human’s) glowing orange eye hovering menacingly behind it, almost stealing the skull’s thunder. There is photoshop fire on either side of the skull’s jaw, and very unconvincing-looking fire at that. Add a really lame band logo to all this total nonsense and you’ve got an album cover that we’re happy to have in the Skullection, but also glad isn’t sitting in our personal CD libraries. Gaudy.

The music:
Workmanlike traditional heavy metal with a thick thread of hard rock embedded inside. Kinda like Michael Schenker Group meets Krokus. There’s a speedy element to it, but not anything we can call “speed metal.” They’re trying, but the songs never gel, are kinda messy in terms of arrangement, and sometimes feel downright silly in overall vibe. The strong accent of singer Vitto and the plastic-sounding drums don’t help. Nor does that album cover. Or the band name. Or song titles like “Wolf Over 3D” and “Rock is My DJ.” Or anything. There’s a lot of dreck in the Italian heavy metal scene, and this isn’t the worst of it, but there are certainly much better. Pass.
— Friar Wagner