SKULL557

VEXED, Italian Aggressive Attack (2002, demo)

The skull:
There’s not much to say about this almost incomprehensibly ugly cover, once said ugliness is duly noted, but I will say that after discovering this skull, I spent entirely too long in a fruitless search on the internet for information about the band Jexed. And no, having to weed through the four consecutive prepositional phrases ending that sentence does not even begin to simulate the frustration I felt in my quest. Although made-up, “jexed” is a word with some currency on the intertubes, but I guess that should come as no surprise. You might think that “Italian Aggressive Attack” is sufficiently unique to turn up some results, but no, that will only get you articles about soccer, or “football” as it is known to most of the shittiest thrash bands in the world. But Jexed, I mean Vexed, are nothing if not true to their vision, because their logo remains unchanged to this day, and at least half of their albums feature some manner of Big Dumb Skull. They clearly just don’t give a shit.

The music:
If Vexed played Maiden-style true metal, and if they hailed from Japan instead of Italy, they’d be Metalucifer. Which is to say that Vexed are shoddy musicians peddling insultingly derivative songs and singing with a hilarious accent in the service of a musical project that is maybe almost bad enough to be funny, except it’s probably not supposed to be a joke, so it’s just sad and stupid. At least, that’s the case on this early two-song effort from the band. This is more than ten years old, so maybe they’ve gotten a lot better in the past decade, but based on this couple of early Kreator knockoffs, I wouldn’t bank on it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL556

PIG IRON, Blues + Power = Destiny (2010, Sounds of Caligula)

The skull:
“Dude, that’s a badass tat! Mind if I take a picture? I want to use it for the cover of my band’s next album.” “Cool, dude! Hey, just come down to the shop where I got it. My bro Jimmy there has a book full of sweet-ass skull tattoo ideas, and that’s where I saw this. You can probably get a better picture from the book.” “Awesome, man, that’d rule!” “So, what is your band like?” “I think it’s pretty hard to categorize us, but some people have said we’re like Skynrd meets Sabbath.” “That sounds awesome! Do you play concerts around here?” “Yeah, man, we’ll be at the VFW this weekend for the whole-hog roast!” “Killer! I’ll try to check it out!” “Yeah, man, I think you’ll really dig it!”

The music:
This is only metal in the loosest sense, and in fact I’d probably just call it southern rock, but I guess there’s a kind of stoner, Sabbathy thing going on here (think Sabbath at their hippiest, though) and I guess that’s good enough. Good enough to get into the Skullection, that is. Not good enough to entertain me. I will grant that Pig Iron sound like they are doing their chosen style well, but that style doesn;t do much for me. I will say one thing: I’d rather listen to this than any of the bellbottom doom acts lighting candles on top of Orange amplifiers. As retro shit goes, that is the absolute worst. This is just the second worst.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL555

SODOR, Evil Thrash Metal (2014, demo)

The skull:
Shit got really dark on the Island of Sodor after the pirates landed. The grainhouses were quickly emptied and of course the mansions and pleasure gardens of the island’s corrupt oligarchs were looted and burned immediately. The de facto governor and the wealthiest man on the island, Sir Topham Hatt, came in for particularly brutal treatment. After being stripped naked and whipped in the street, he was dragged in chains before a largely celebratory populace gathered in the central square of Tidmouth. There he was castigated, stoned, then drawn, hanged, and quartered. His head was impaled on a cross taken from one of the many looted churches on the island, and left out to rot and bleach as reminder of the merciless power of the pirates. His signature hat, once the very symbol of his power, was cast into the crowd where it was torn to shreds. Several farmers added scythes to the grim display as a token reminder of the especial suffering of the agricultural class under Hatt’s rule. The islanders quickly found that even without their rail system (which was plundered or simply destroyed by the invaders) and despite having to pay a fairly heavy tax of farmed goods to the brigands, their real incomes actually increased under the pseudo-rule of the pirates, who, after all, were not nearly as rapacious as the island’s former kleptocratic regime.

The music:
Even by the standards of Brazilian rethrash, this is pretty weak, with dull songs, poor playing, and tinny sound. Sodor borrows as heavily from crappy crossover (of the Cryptic Slaughter variety) as from the German stuff usually aped by South American thrashers. The rubbery bass and high pitched, rasping vocals recall Sadus somewhat, but only their earliest demos, as they were far more advanced even by Illusions than Sodor are here. Then again, these dudes probably average 19 years old, so maybe I should cut them some slack. No one starts great, right? Still, they’re gonna need to get a LOT better to satisfy just the least discriminating of modern thrash hounds, and I think there’s no chance at all that they’ll ever improve so much that I’d like them.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL554

INFESTER, Darkness Unveiled (1992, demo)

The skull:
The badly drawn demon skull (named Lester the Infester, I hope) is certainly big and dumb, but I’m especially amused by the six pointed turkey leg star behind the skull. I mean, that’s what those things are, right? Giant drumsticks? I know that Lester is supposed to scare me away, but I can’t help it; I’m hungry for poultry now.

The music:
Friar Wagner was sent by The Council on some kind of secret mission, so it will fall to me to cover his skulls for a bit, but it’s too bad he’s missing out on Infester, because this is the kind of old school death metal that he, well, likes slightly more than I do. They don’t exactly sound like Blasphemy (a favorite touchstone for the other Friar) but they’re in the same ballpark, maybe also reminding of early Incantation or Deeds of Flesh. Basically, they’re a better version of Rottrevore. The vocals are far gurglier than I like in my death metal, and some of the riffing is a too rudimentary, but when they slow it down and kick it Bolt Thrower style, I can dig it, and when they dance near the fringes of thrash, they recall other borderline bands of the time like my beloved Thanatos. I certainly wasn’t collecting death metal demos in 1992, and if I had been, I probably would have been put off by the murky sound here, but in retrospect, this sounds pretty good for an early 90s death metal demo, and looking back, it’s only because there were so many better bands that Infester (and their ilk) never went anywhere. It’s not that they were terrible, or even below average; it’s just that there were more great bands than anyone really knew what to do with.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL553

LUTHOR, A Shadow Out of Time (2012, self-released)

The skull:
There’s a lot going on here, but are those horns made out of snakes? Because that would be pretty awesome! Not awesome enough to redeem this mess of a cover, probably, but it couldn’t hurt. Rainbow covers like this are maybe even worse than brown covers. I mean, this was obviously meant to be brown all over, but someone, maybe the artist, maybe the band, realized near the end that they were looking at a very lame brown cover, and they tried to fix it by inexplicably adding some more color, like throwing a green gel over the projector when Frankenstein appears on screen. This is not a solution. The solution is to recompose the entire scene in a way that allows for a realistic spectrum of colors. You can’t just spray paint your lame brown cover and call it a day. It doesn’t work that way! And anyway, the reason this cover is a BDS is probably just that no one in the band could really parse Lovercraft’s descriptions of the Elder Race. We should be looking at a Big Dumb Rugose Cone, possibly the first of its kind, and yet here we are, puzzling over the 553rd Big Dumb Skull. I’d say that’s a hell of a missed opportunity.

The music:
From my years spent in the prog metal trenches, I know this type of band well. All these dudes probably grew up on Queensryche and that sort of operatic progressive metal, but when Nevermore came out, they realized the days of Mindcrime-worship were over, and they’d have to heavy up if they wanted to get anywhere. A huge part of the Nightmare Records catalog documents this phenomenon. That’s not to say that these bands are bad. Plenty of them are fine, maybe even good. But I think at the core, there’s a compromise in evidence here that taints the work in some fundamental way, if you know where to look. Or maybe it’s just me. Anyway, Luthor are pretty good at what they do, musically at least. Their singer is another story. Despite a Halford-esque range, his voice is charmless, his melodies dull, and his lyrics painfully on-the-nose, plus he’s very loud in the mix. As you might have guessed from the title, this is a concept EP based on the H.P. Lovecraft story of (almost) the same name, and if you bother to listen to the words you’ll get a Cliff’s Notes summary of the plot. As a concept album, this is about as successful as Nostradamus, although it has the benefit of brevity – it’s under 20 minutes long. There are some fine riffs scattered about here, the playing is tight, and the production is top notch, but I just can’t get excited by Luthor. They do show some potential, and maybe I’ll check out their new album, because if they can get their singer under control, they could probably do some damage. Maybe.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL552

DEZPERADOZ, An Eye for an Eye (2008, AFM)

The skull:
The typography is obviously inspired by the handbills and wanted posters of the mythical old west, and dem crossbones is pistols, but this whole design looks more like an ad for a sad burlesque revival featuring hipsters in Betty Page push up bras and ten gallon hats winking and pointing toy guns at the ironically mustachioed crowd, while making corny double entendres and singing along to some jaunty number performed on a tinny upright piano. Which is to say, it takes me to a very sad place inside and makes me want to cry.

The music:
I first encountered this band, originally known as Desperados, in a used CD shop in Palm Desert, CA in 2001. I was on a desperate and lonely work assignment, and deep in a sour mood when I found the shop in some ungodly strip mall, and I must have arrived there shortly after some metalhead dumped a large part of his fairly interesting collection. I must have bought 25 discs from that place, and one of them was Desperados. I picked it up to examine because it had the GUN logo on it, and when I saw that the band included none other than Tom Angelripper of Sodom, I put it in my pile immediately. From maintaining a Sodom fanpage back in the mid 90s, and from several interviews I conducted with Tom, I knew him to be a huge wild west enthusiast, but I had never heard of the band, which turned out to be a project led by Alex Kraft, who also spent time in Tom’s Onkel Tom joke band. Anyway, that first album sounded basically like low grade, late 90s Sodom, but all the songs were about the wild west. It was mildly amusing, but not so good that when the band changed names and issued a second album without Angelripper, I had any interest in keeping. But here I am, nearly 15 years later, forced to contend again with Dezperados. An Eye for an Eye is the band’s third outing, but most of the thrash is gone, replaced with a kind of souped-up spaghetti western metal. Imagine some guy pitching “Ennio Morricone meets Rammstein” to the suits at AFM, and you’ve pretty much got the idea. I suppose this is a successful realization of the concept, but the concept just doesn’t do much for me. If you love the soundtracks to old western shoot-em-ups, but wish they featured a few more crunchy riffs, then this, my friend, is the disc for you. Elsewise, relegate Dezperadoz to that part of your brain dedicated to odd metal trivia and move on with your life.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL551

SOPHICIDE, Perdition of the Sublime (2012, Willowtip)

The skull:
Perdition of the Sublime is perfect death metalese, a jury-rigged assembly of college entrance-exam test words strung together to form some semblance of a meaning, even if no one would ever use them in that order in a sentence. A bonus layer of antichristian mockery is included here, as “perdition” has a specific theological meaning that lends the objective “sublime” an almost oxymoronic air. But, no matter how to interpret the pretentious title, you’re unlikely to require a moon, a skull, or a tree. But once you’ve relegated the sublime to perdition, you have to make do with the base materials left behind, and in that case, I suppose Sophicide have done the best they could. Still, is brown the only non-sublime color? Must fucking be.

The music:
Sophicide sail the same sonic seas as Spawn of Possession or Soreption, and if Sophicide aren’t quite as good as either of those bands, they’re still an excellent technical death metal outfit, making music that delivers on both brutality and sophistication. For my tastes, this is a bit blastier than is ideal, but generally speaking, Sophicide aren’t tripping over themselves to out-evil the next band, while still presenting their heaviest elements without sounding like they’re trying too hard (a la Son of Aurelius’s first record), and the widdly instrumental bits are genuinely impressive. Naturally, songcraft is more or less ignored here, and the flow from riff to riff sounds random as much as anything, but rare are the moments where I feel the band just crammed two riffs together for lack of a better idea. The lead work is fairly astounding, too, even if it comes off sometimes as a bit TOO composed (I don’t require all-out-jazz in my lead guitar, but I prefer when leads at least give the impression of a player following his muse in the moment.) All in all, this is an excellent album, and certainly one of the best I’ve listened to for this project in the past year. Not just good for a Big Dumb Skull, this is honestly excelent and should be required listening for tech death enthusiasts.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL550

SCAR TISSUE, D.S.B.M.  (demo, 2012)

The skull:
This is why you never let your cover subject choose your album title (in this case, demo title). The sole dude in Scar Tissue (friends call him “Scar-T” for short) allowed the skull to give a title to his time in the spotlight. Since Scar-T didn’t bothter to do shit in terms of concept, setting or even lame Photoshoppery, doing nothing but placing the skull on a pedestal and having a reasonably talented medical school pal pencil-draw him, our hero didn’t have much to work with. Including brains. He spit out, in a barely audible, creaky, , wheezing croak, “Dumb…Skull…Big…Metal.” D.S.B.M. That’s good enough for us here at B.D.S.

The music:
Okay, so in real life, D.S.B.M. stands for Depressive Swedish Black Metal. Guess what kind of music Scar Tissue plays? Have you connected the dots yet? Good. But don’t waste too much time on it. Scar Tissue released this one-song demo, then another one song demo in 2013 (also featuring a skull on the cover, a more deteriorated version of this one), and then broke up. Depressing, eh? Not really. “Drained of All Life” delivers exactly what’s advertised. It’s okay if you dig this sort of thing, but it’s got about as much appeal to me as some third-tier Russian funeral doom band. Sort of a bastard child of early Katatonia and Thergothon, but not even as cool as that sounds. A+ for buzzing, creepy, dank, suffocating, cobweb-smothered atmosphere, C- for durability and appeal.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL549

MEMORAIN, Evolution (2012, Maple Metal)

The skull:
Ah, this old chestnut, the crusty, shooped skull wreathed in flames. Add some snakes and you’ve got a Kataklysm cover. Add some tentacles and you’ve got a Feast for Crows cover. Add, well, a little more fire, and you’ve got a Dismember cover. Enough is enough, people! Try wreathing your skulls in something novel. Marshmallows, maybe, or Hot Wheels, or kittens. Memorain could have just piled up copies of On the Origin of Species under their skull, and they’d have had a thematically relevant BDS. Think outside the firebox, is what I’m suggesting to all you aspiring BDSers.

The music:
Memorain are one of those Greek bands with mysterious cash reserves, enough to hire, say, Gene Hoglan, Steve Di’Giorgio, and Ralph Santolla (that is: three quarters of the Individual Thought Patterns touring lineup) to play on their middling power metal album. The album before this featured Nick Menza on drums, and for some reason, on Evolution, they let Dave Ellefson write a song, and even worse, let Tim Owens sing it. It’s not that Memorain are bad (for the most part), but they are kind of dull, and for as much as they must have spent for the rhythm section, you’d think they’d have put a little more cash into the mixing, because this is not an especially good sounding album. DiGiorgio, in particular, is hard to hear, which is too bad because it sounds like he’s really going nuts on some of these tracks. Hoglan, though, delivers one of his most mercenary, uninspired performances. He’s perfectly in time, but creatively checked out. As for Santolla, well, who cares? That guy is never especially interesting, right? The whole affair is thoroughly basted in tough-guy posturing, and despite not sounding like any one band (that you could name – bands like this always sound like other unknown bands, probably in a case of convergent evolution), they manage to still come off as totally generic: power metal for Pantera lovers, or something. At times they sound depressingly like modern Overkill (but not Ironbound), and while I do harbor a deep and admittedly irrational love for those Jersey boys, that love absolutely does not extend to other groups peddling lame modern groove thrash. Memorain aren’t even close to a terrible band, and by the standards of the average Big Dumb Skull entrant, they rate in the top ten percent, easy, but that doesn’t make listening to their album all that much more enjoyable, only less painful.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL548

SMASH SKULLS, First Step to Destruction (2009, demo)

The skull:
Heads up, budding skull scholars! Here we see the formation of the Master Skull from which all other skulls are born. This image depicts the theory posited by most eminent skullologists, a couple of which are on staff here at Big Dumb Skulls as members of the Council of the Elders of the Skull. In this artist’s rendering, the Master Skull is shown originating through something akin to the Big Bang, wherein energy appeared from seemingly nothing in an instant, after which many crucial cosmological events take place. As the theory goes, its magnetic force pulls all newly formed matter toward it, using all manner of boulder and meteor to construct its spooky visage. Since it is, as is known, the intent of all skulls everywhere to cause untold amounts of destruction, this theory is known amongst skullologists as the “First Step to Destruction.” Were it not for this most critical event, many metal bands would have nowhere to turn to artistic inspiration and, in turn, we would not have a blog about skulls, so please give this most important of skull-related events your strictest attention, study and reverence.

All right, class dismissed.

The music:
This is fairly competent re-thrash rehash, although the vocals are absolutely terrible. The dude has no power or presence, blathering into the microphone as if it just doesn’t fucking matter who sings or how well or poorly they do it. Musically, again, it’s competent, but never have I heard such aimless arrangements. It’s like they just got riff ideas and laid them down like train tracks in the order they were conceived. That this Portugese band sounds like a third-rate English thrash band circa 1992 should tell you everything else you need to know. If they spent more time honing their songwriting skills, and not showing how well the drummer can balance while standing on top of his drum kit, they might just kick themselves up a notch to being worthy of comparison with second-rate English thrash bands circa 1992. Here’s hoping.
— Friar Wagner