SKULL608

IGNIVOMOUS, Path of Attrition  (2007, Nuclear War Now! Productions)

The skull:
Although this cover is obscured in tarry black and sanguine rust red shades, one thing is clear: this skull is being used for some kind of nasty spell-casting. Or perhaps to help light up catacombs that reveal far grimmer things than we’re allowed to see on this cover. Or, hopefully, both. So we’ve got the book and candle, but no bell. We’ve come across this issue before, and we understand bell-makers the world over are feeling rather overlooked in the world of skull album covers, and are forming a committee to address the problem. Also, I’m pretty sure the book the skull is propped upon isn’t a first edition hardcover copy of Bridges of Madison County.

The music:
About as mired in filth, darkness and indistinct-but-probably-very-evil-things as the album cover itself, the music of Ignivomous is exactly what can be expected from various vets of the Australian death/black metal scene. Obvious inspiration comes from the rawer, earlier work of Incantation, Immolation, Rottrevore and even hints of Suffocation without the technicality. Heavy-as-fuck death metal, basically, with a decidedly dark orientation. This could have been released in 1990 on Relapse or Roadrunner and it would have fit right in.  They’re very good at their chosen craft, and if you can’t get enough of this kind of thing, there are about 200 less convincing death metal revivalists making the rounds right now. Ignivomous appear to be one of the best of this breed, for what it’s worth.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL607

SOCIAL DESPAIR, Social Despair (2007, demo)

The skull:
I don’t recall seeing another skull with only half a jaw. For all the violence we’ve seen visited on skulls here at Skull HQ, this seems the most brutal. What holds the thing on, I can’t say, but I bet it hurts like all hell. Fortunately, this guy looks to be riding out his Hellraiser-esque eternity in style, what with that kickin’ mullet and badass fangs. He’s probably like, “Yeah, I’m all chained up through a hole in my top, and my bottom jaw is fucking busted in half, but they didn’t even ding the fangs! Suckers!” That’s some Myth of Sisyphus-level existentialism right there, folks.

The music:
Obviously, this is a thrash band. Obviously. The name, the logo, and of course the cover all give it away. But, they don’t have the sound of a trendhopping rethrash act. Instead, they sound like a bunch of meatheads who wanted to play death metal but found it was just too hard, so they dumbed it down and arrived at some kind of remedial thrash, the sort played by high school bands in 1991 who mostly decorated their denim vests with Metallica patches but who just discovered Deicide. The sound is awful, the playing sloppy, the riffs dull, and the vocals unlistenable. At least the songs are short. Interestingly, Social Despair appear to have released an album only last year — there’s proof of it on their Facebook page — but despite an even more awesome BDS cover, the album doesn’t appear on Metal Archives and I can’t find sound samples for it. So, maybe Social Despair got their act together and turned into a good band, although I can’t say I have particularly high hopes for a record called Refusal for Abreaction.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL606

OLD WOUNDS, Terror Eyes  (2011, RDG)

The skull:
Assuming this skull is actual size, the serpent is immediately rendered unthreatening since it’s the size of a baby garden snake, and the candle would be kinda tiny too, stuck in the eye like that. Probably a cinnamon-scented joint straight outta Pier One. You’re gonna have to put a lot more terror into those eyes to freak us out here at BDS, and doubtless other curators/lovers of the skull will be left unimpressed. This ain’t nothin’.

The music:
Terror Eyes = Terrorize, eh? Clever. As hell. This is a 7” and it only sounds metal if you’re not very familiar with metal. The metal-or-not distinction is only relevant here because Big Dumb Skulls reviews metal albums with skulls on the cover. No punk, no rockabilly, no alt.country, or any other genre with an affection for the skull. But this is close enough to the kind of hipster Brooklyn-core pseudo-metal that’s all the rage these days, and even sounds like something Relapse might sign. Kind of Unsane meets Botch meets Trap Them, but in much more generic form. It churns and spits and rages appropriately, but that’s about all it does. There’s no underlying, existential purpose behind these five short songs, nothing that grabs you by the throat and screams anything important at you. It’s too dry and one-dimensional. Probably hugely inspirational to a young kid with very few reference points for what extreme music is like, but I’d be surprised if many old vets would find much of interest here.

— Friar Wagner

SKULL605

AGGRESSIVE MUTILATOR, Skull Torture (2012, demo)

The skull:
Sure, it looks like a skull on a stake, but look closer at that alleged pike: doesn’t it look a lot like these? And if that’s just a concrete nail, then this skull is incredibly tiny. I think the artiste who crafted this fine piece of art just pulled the skeleton out of his aquarium and popped the skull onto a nail for his model. I suppose that constitutes torture of a sort. Or maybe it’s the most horrifying torture you can subject a skull to, rendering him badly for a shitty demo. “Tell me everything I wish to know, aquarium skull!” “You can’t break me! I’ll never talk!” “Very well. Then it won’t bother you at all if I submit this crudely sketched likeness to a bunch of Swedish posers for their old school black metal demo.” “You wouldn’t!” “I would, mister skull, and if you don’t start cooperating, the next drawing is going to a death metal band in Ecuador.” “NOOOOOOO!!!!!!”

The music:
This plays a little like a parody of the first Bathory album, with songs built on braindead Venom-style riffs (like, two per song), croaky frogman vocals, and lyrics that would have been too dumb for Tom Angelripper circa 1982. I can’t imagine a person who would like this demo and also enjoy the humor of Big Dumb Skulls, but on the off chance you listen to this kind of thing ironically, well, bust out your mustache wax because it’s going to be an event to remember.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL604

REPLACIRE, The Human Burden (2012, self-released)

The skull:
The rendering of this artwork is generally excellent. The background red/orange and the scaly gray of the skull work really well together. We’re a bit torn including this image, however, because of the appearance of a spinal column, but since we like this artwork and music as much as we do, we’ll give it a pass. However, we hate to burst the artist’s bubble, but there’s a little problem with the eyes. Should we tell him they’re in the wrong place, or let him carry on believing it’s all as it should be? Doesn’t he know?

The music:
In a world where sterile blast-attack tech-death is all the rage, Boston band Replacire come as a bit of a breath of fresh air. This is truly progressive death metal, inspired in equal measure, I’m guessing, by the meat-and-potatoes forefathers as by myriad other, stranger bands, in and outside of the death metal realm. If you took the groove, melodies and song craft of Last Crack, the nimbleness of Elements-era Atheist, random moments of Leprous-ness, and the cleaner passages off the last two Akercocke albums, and then  (nope, I’m not done yet) deftly threaded them through a band whose basic foundation recalls something like early Gorguts meets Malevolent Creation, then you’re getting in the basic ballpark of what Replacire does. Each member steps up and delivers an excellent performance, and for material this complex, they craft it in a way that’s never too overly or overtly complicated. The digestibility of this stuff shows exactly why Replacire are a special band with a vision that’s rare in modern metal. It’s a bit worrying that we’re in the second half of 2014 and they haven’t released a follow-up yet, because they clearly have so much more to give, based on this excellent display. Let’s hope they’re still around, but if they changed the band name, that wouldn’t be so bad.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL603

NIGHTMARE CITY, Nightmare Tape (2014, Electric Assault)

The skull:
Now this here is a stunningly awesome hand-drawn Big Dumb Skull. The best way to look at it is to imagine that the giant flaming skull is neither attacking the city nor being attacked, but rather is just sitting there. Like, one night people looked out the windows of their high rise condominiums and instead of the sunset saw an enormous skull with smoke and fire pouring out of its eyes. What could be more terrifying than that? I mean, aside from the skull smiling.

The music:
Imagine if Sodom had recorded their debut EP with the relative instrumental prowess of Venom (a massive upgrade, if you can imagine it). That’s what Nightmare City sounds like, more or less. I guess that Nightmare City are a lot more concerned with the powers of Rock than the powers of Satan, and they lean a bit more punk than metal sometimes, but in those cases, just imagine a missing link between The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette and Tank’s Filth Hounds of Hades. These guys capture the raw early 80s more or less perfectly, and they do it while avoiding the winking tone that scuttles a lot of these sorts of retro acts. I like a lot of the bands that inspire Nightmare City and their ilk (think: Superchrist, Asomvel) but I’m not totally sold on the need for anything new in this style, but if you’re on board with the scene, you need to check these guys out.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL602

PSICORRAGIA, Ruina Y Muerte…El Genesis  (2011, Gate of Horror Productions)

The skull:
Clearly one of those skulls unearthed in an archeological dig, which is one of the most fertile sources for skull covers, but unless you do the digging yourself, don’t you think you should at least give credit to the digger? We’d sure love to see a band wholly dedicate themselves to the skull by going out and unearthing the bony noggin with their own bare hands. That would be impressive. This plundering of National Geographic isn’t fooling anyone.

The music:
Psycho-Rage-ia, huh? The name makes you think pizza-n-beer thrash metal, but no, these Peruvians play death/doom seemingly inspired by early Anathema and Clouds-era Tiamat. It’s got violin, electric piano and mandolin, so it clearly goes one instrument too far into the frilly lace ‘n’ growl world that divides great doom/death from the cheesy stuff. This release collects their 1998 demo and 2001 debut album, and if you can get past the horribly played, out of-tune violin that opens up the demo and into the material on the album, you’ll find they improved considerably in those three years. They made a wise decision opening up the collection with the album, because Otono has got to be one of the most feebly-performed demos I’ve ever heard. They could skate by if they were a Sodom-esque sorta band, but when you’re going for ornate gothic/doom/death, you better at least be semi-competent. Purple velvet and red wine doom/death is generally not for me, so if you liked the first Celestial Seaosn album or that one by Enchantment, go for this! The rest of you, stick with early Anathama and early My Dying Bride, because that stuff still has never been bested.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL601

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, The Year Of Our Lord (2002, Willowtip)

The skull:
This looks like the homemade invitation to someone’s Halloween party. Someone who takes Halloween entirely too seriously, but is also not very good at it. You know the type. Like, sure, winged skulls can be pretty scary, but this winged skull is not, and while I’m sure the card-making program made it easy to wrap the whole thing in those borders, were they really a good idea? And what the fuck does any of this have to do with The Year Of Our Lord? Unless your lord is Charlie, nothing.

The music:
With a cover like this, I fully expected some kind of biker doom, but The Year Of Our Lord are a pretty decent melodic death metal band. It was only after I started listening to them that I noticed they were on Willowtip, a label that is very unlikely to have ever signed a sludge band or whatever. Anyway, this is specifically that kind of melodic death metal where you’d expect to hear a violin (or a synthesized simulation thereof) and the lyrics are about windswept moors and other other mopey, romantic shit. Romantic like Lord Byron, not Jackie Collins. Now, I love a clubfooted playboy as much as the next guy, but that’s not really my scene. If you like your MDM brooding and gothic, however, this band is WAY better than their art would suggest, and you’d probably enjoy them.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL600

WEIRD BEAST, Moon-Horn  (2011, self-released)

The skull:
I suppose a beast, in its purest essence, is kinda weird. It’s wild, it’s crazy, it’s nuts…so okay, we’ll call beasts “weird” for the sake of this band’s argument. Are skulls weird? Not really. Every single one of us owns at least one. There have been billions of them through the millennia of time. But is it weird to throw a heat radar detection device at a skull? Sure! And here we have Weird Beast’s weird skull:  a hot head, cold eye sockets, and mild-temperature jaws (and one mild-temperature central incisor). What’s this all have to do with “Moon-Horn”? Fuck if I know.

The music:
These Washingtonians whip up a very Northwest-y sounding racket. Song titles like “Beastery” and “Roast the Goat” are a dead giveaway. It’s like they learned from home state heroes like Melvins and Tad, couldn’t help but be influenced by Pantera (so many victims of those Texan rednecks, just unbelievable) and added (un)healthy doses of Eyehategod and Acid Bath. It’s definitely stoner-y in the sense that it doesn’t sound like it took much imagination to assemble, but there’s a thin thread of uniqueness running through these four songs, especially when it edges into pig-grunt death metal territory. But I said “thin” thread; it’s a bit of a mess at this early stage. If these beasts got truly weird, I mean, really really weird, it would be a lot more fun than this pedestrian sort of beer-drinkin’ lumberjack noise/sludge/rock/metal.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL599

MORBID COMMAND, Vox Spectrum (2011, demo)

The skull:
Ordinarily, the presence of a spine is enough to disqualify a skull from being a proper Big Dumb Skull, but The Council occasionally allows it when, as here, the spine is not so much a suggestion or part of a skeleton, but some kind of wicked rat rail for a gnarly skull. And this skull is definitely gnarly. He could be bigger, but he couldn’t be dumber, or angrier, possibly because he’s sick of dragging his goofy spine around. His skull buddies started calling him Snake Dickskin, and that’s really starting to chap his (metaphorical) ass. They’ll be (figuratively) ribbing him, and he’ll be like, “You know I can’t get it off, because I don’t have any hands either, but if one of you fucking jokers wants to bite it off, be my fucking guest!” So far, he’s had no takers.

The music:
This is the sort of demo that might now be a classic had it come out in 1985 — a murky, sloppy slab of Teutonic death/thrash that plays up the elements of the style that would later influence black metal. But even so, demos like that only really became classic in retrospect, when the bands who made them grew up and got a little better. Had Destruction stopped with Bestial Invasion of Hell, or Kreator with End of the World or Sodom with Witching Metal, would anyone but the most diehard lovers of shitful noise care? Sure, those tapes found an audience in the early 80s, but they’re only known now because of Release from Agony, Pleasure to Kill, and Persecution Mania. And it’s not clear that Morbid Command ever reached anything near those heights before breaking up in 2013 (although I will grant they were definitely starting to get there by the time of their last split release). A certain kind of retro metalhead will love this, the kind who has bootleg Warrant and Poison and Slaughter patches on his denim and still gets kind of pissed when people think he’s boosting hair metal bands, like he’s some kind of fucking poser.
— Friar Johnsen