SKULL80

SUBHUMAN, Delirio No. 1  (2005, demo)

The skull:
You can’t really lose copping an H.R. Giger painting for your album cover. From ELP to Celtic Frost, bands have made good use of it. I even remember Argentinian band Vibrion snagging a detail from an H.R. Giger cover and making it their own. And there are many others. So, of course this cover is amazing. A grinning, or more likely mouth-raped skull is having something forced into its maw, a gun or something phallic, or something approximating either. Fun for the viewer to decipher and interpret! The skull sits amongst a typically Giger-esque world of bluish gray, in what looks like a gargantuan wall of syringes and machinery, largely symmetrical and absolutely mammoth in scope.

The music:
On the surface, this band should be amazing. An H.R. Giger cover, the good taste to Subhuman-ize Faith No More’s excellent “Surprise! You’re Dead!!!,” and the Coroner-ish first minutes of “Il Vecchio Bastardo.” But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that most of the rest of the music does not live up to the cover. While this demo has its moments, it loses itself chasing its tail in a bland near-Meshuggah sort of chunka-chunka death/thrash uber-aggro throwdown. There’s something inspired boiling under the surface, and there are some great guitar leads here, but otherwise it’s probably a good thing it’s a demo, because it sounds and acts like one. Maybe the two albums they have released since capitalize on whatever potential is here? Go check it out and get back to me on that, okay?
— Friar Wagner

SKULL79

SKULL HARVEST, Skull Harvest (2001, demo)

The skull:
“How’d the harvest go, pa?”
“Not so good, ma.”
“How many?”
“Just one. Well, part of one.”
“Are we gonna lose the skull farm, pa?”
“‘Fraid so.”
This cover is spectacularly ugly, full of weird pixelated noise and blacks that don’t match. You used to see a lot of this sort of thing in the 90s, when the unqualified dudes tasked with making their band’s album cover first started using computers but didn’t realize that screen and print resolutions were very different. Even so, I’m baffled by the junk surrounding this sad, lonely skull. Did someone just scribble it in MS-Paint? If nothing else, it was nice of the nameless, incompetent designer to paste the skull on top of the logo. That’s dedication to the big dumb skull!

The music:
Metal Archives classifies Skull Harvest as thrash, and maybe they were in 2001, but the only tunes I could find online were from nearly a decade later, and I guess you’d call that stuff death rock, maybe. Occasionally the music veers toward Sabbathy doom, but the bellowing vocals really feel out of place then. Everything about Skull Harvest sounds kind of amateurish, making me think this is the German equivalent of the crappy groove metal you encounter at shitty bars on thursdays here in the States.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL78

SKULL HAMMER, Fear the Truth  (2008, self-released)

The skull:
The skull leers with a sinister smile, a mouth fulla teeth. It’s hand-drawn by someone moderately talented and the hammer shape that frames the word “Hammer” is nice. There are umlauts over the “U” in skull so that you know how to pronounce it properly. It’s the choices of color I don’t get…blue, purple and various shades of yellow, with the logo colors nearing pastel shades. This brings down the potential metal-ness/wickedness of this cover. Sorry, not even that bad-ass lightning bolt can help. As Big Dumb Skulls go, though, this is a remarkable entry!

The music:
In the intro of this website (“About”), I noted we would be, among other things, trying to determine how the choice of a simple skull on an album cover correlates with the music inside. Is the skull making a statement, is it purposely playing on recognizable metal motifs, is it a lazy choice mirrored by equally lazy music? In Skull Hammer’s case, you get a boring-ass bunch of music with your skull. Their music is thrash, I guess…mid-paced to mildly fast, in some ways reminding of mid-period Overkill. But worse. “Groove thrash,” I guess you’d call it, but it doesn’t have the groove to make your booty move, and I have a hard time seriously calling it “thrash,” as there’s nothing intense or violent about it. Vocals are vanilla tough-guy style, and there is nothing remarkable about any of the riffs in any of these four songs on this mercifully short EP. For trivia seekers, the main dude in the band, vocalist/guitarist Steve “Ace” McArdle, used to be in Lethal Fury, who released two so-so (mostly “so?”) demos in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL77

BRUTISH CREATION, Death Pursues Us (2006, Macabre Mastermind)

The skull:
Big, dumb, and framed by two very terrible fonts. I read an article recently which suggested the overbite that pretty much everyone has (meaning, when you close your mouth all the way, your lower teeth nestle behind your upper teeth in the front) is a relatively recent phenomenon, caused (it is hypothesized) by the use of utensils. This guy here appears to lack this overbite, so perhaps this skull predates the widespread adoption of utensils? If the skull is Death himself, then I guess that would make sense. Death don’t need no fork.

The music:
Bob Egler is Brutish Creation, and Bob Egler is not very good at music. Obviously recorded in Bob’s bedroom, featuring a cheap drum machine and beats no actual drummer could (or would) play, Death Pursues Us is a grim slab of thrashy death metal (or deathy thrash metal: take your pick) that reminds me distantly of early Sepultura, although I can’t say exactly why. It’s certainly not the riffing, or the songwriting, or the vocals (which Bob belts out charmlessly), but I guess maybe the guitar tone sorta reminds me of the Brazilians? Who knows. This demo-level recording is a tough listen, and while Bob’s produced a few more “albums” since this, I have no interest whatsoever in knowing if he got any better.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL76

VIKING SKULL, Chapter One  (2003, Grand Union)

The skull:
Generic stoner rock background hosts a skull that could be that of a Viking, but also could not. Who the hell knows? All skulls are created equal…but not all skull album covers are. This one is on the gaudy side of the tracks. Those wings on either side of the head remind me of the Red Wing shoe company logo and look hopelessly out of place floating there like that. What appear to be crossed knives at the bottom I first saw as joints. Which they might as well be, considering the rest of this cover, and the music. And if they are knives, they don’t look all that deadly. Then there’s the skull itself, which is just kind of there, wearing a leering sarcastic smile as if to say “…and I have to float here under THIS ‘logo’? Kill me now…again.” We hail Viking Skull’s commitment to skull covers, but this is the only one we’ll allow into the Skullection.

The music:
Big, bruisin’, burly traditional heavy metal. Maybe. Who knows if it’s 100 genuine, their roots are in a band called Raging Speedhorn, who I remember being really boring noise rock/metal stuff. This first release from Viking Skull, and all others since, seem to be aiming for the hearts of all those folks who like fourth-rate rehashed traditional heavy metal, when we all know that most of the best stuff came out in the ’80s. Besides, this is just crap stoner rock masquerading as heavy metal. “Beers, Drugs and Bitches” and “Crazy Trucker”…junky stuff that I never ever want to hear again. I’d rather listen to White Wizzard…any day.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL75

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

SKULL74

OTARGOS, Fuck God – Disease Process  (2009, Rupture Music)

The skull:
This skull, shown in a stark black and white photograph, looks off into the distance as if thinking “Where are my fellows? Why am I not in a pile with them? Am I not a pile-worthy skull?” He’s sitting on a cliff face or some rock formation, embedded just enough to look like he’s hovering, and we’re glad he’s alone, because BDS does not accept skull piles (although there are many such album covers, and we respect that). Or perhaps he rests in a tomb, solitary, and grateful to the person who just opened the vault door, which would explain the light on the skull’s forehead. This photo offers much in the way of contemplation and guesswork. For something not very artistically imaginative, there’s plenty to ponder.

The music:
Technically this is very good stuff. Often lightning-speed, this French band’s black metal buzzes like prime Marduk with a slightly artier twist. They’re not afraid of sounding clean and clinical, and that puts across their coldness probably better than choosing to record “necro”/raw. Although each track offers an interesting riff here or mindblowing drum blast there, there’s not quite enough variation, and they’re going for a particular aesthetic that’s been run into the ground by now. But they do it very well. (The band plays Dark Funeral covers, if that helps tell you where their heads are at.) You need but check out opening track “Dawn of the Ethereal Monolith” to know whether this band is for you or not.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL73

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

SKULL72

GORGOROTH, Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt  (2009, Regain)

The skull:
My, look at those cavernous eye sockets. This skull manages to look as bleak and grim as the band’s music sounds. It hovers above a black abyss, and the wood-carved design adds a bit of an ancient or medieval vibe to this simplistic yet totally effective album cover. Let’s face it, some of the album covers we treasure here at BDS are a joke, artistically, but this one is truly good.

The music:
Gorgoroth’s eighth album came in the wake of not a little controversy over the band’s name, ex-singer Gaahl’s coming out of the closet, and leader Infernus being accused of all manner of criminal activity, from kidnapping, rape and illegal possession of weapons. Assembling a new band in the form of session drummer Tomas Asklund (also known from Dawn) and bassist Boddel (aka Frank Watkins of Obituary) and welcoming back vocalist Pest, Quantos… manages to be the most interesting Gorgoroth album since 2000’s Incipit Satan and it compares favorably to the band’s classic mid ’90s stuff. But it’s different too. Quantos… sports a clean production and is more melodic than most of their other albums, yet it still does what Gorgoroth does best: cold, epic, ferocious black metal with a few nods to ancient heavy metal traditions (though not quite as overboard as Darkthrone’s last several albums. They ain’t Agent Steel and never will be.) The variety of tempos and textures keeps this album from feeling static, and while Pest’s one-trick pony snarl can get tiring, he puts in a great performance nonetheless. The moments of clean vocal in “Human Sacrifice” are effective in breaking up the monochromatic screeching elsewhere. Infernus offers hypnotic layers and interesting chord choices throughout the album, showing that, despite all the crap he endured and inflicted in the years prior to this recording, he remains a master of black metal guitar. And it’s quite alright if Gorgoroth is taking several years to make records these days, as long as the quality remains on the level displayed here. Quite why Infernus lost his mind and re-recorded 1997’s perfectly-fine-as-it-was Under the Sign of Hell again in 2011, rather than working on new material, remains one of his more questionable moves. Still, Gorgoroth remains king.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL71

ACHERON, Satanic Supremacy (2008, Frozen Darkness Productions)

The skull:
Just the straight-up Totenkopf insignia of the Nazi SS. As if the association wasn’t obvious enough, the initial “S”es in the title are rendered in the sig runes used by the Schutzstaffel as well. You’d be forgiven for thinking Acheron were some kind of racist NS band, but as far as I know, they’re just ridiculous Satanists trying to make some kind of point.

The music:
Acheron is one of those bands that’s just always been around. I’ve been dutifully passing over their albums in used CD bins for my entire life as a heavy metal enthusiast. They’re hardly the worst band out there, but their no-frills, old school death metal just doesn’t so anything for me. When I tracked down some mp3s of this cassette, I initially assumed it was one of their early demos, maybe from the late 80s, before realizing this is, shockingly, a recording from 2008. It’s a cassette tape for fuck’s sake! From 2008. You’d never know it from the sound, or the music, or the lyrics, which are of high school quality, that this was produced so recently. It cannot be said that Acheron don’t stick to their guns, though, as this demo pushes the same mid-tempo Tampa DM sound the band has been working since the beginning (even if they’re doing it from Ohio, now.) All three of these songs were rerecorded for the band’s next (and to date latest) album, so I guess if you want to hear them with a little more polish, you can listen to them on The Final Conflict: Last Days of God. But, I doubt you do.
— Friar Johnsen