Monthly Archives: August 2014

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ELEGY FOR EULISZA, demo 2005 (2005, demo)

The skull:
Alas, poor Eulisza! I knew her, Horatio. Like, in the biblical sense. She hath borne me on her back a thousand times, you know what I’m saying? Woof! And now she’s dead, gross. Here hung those lips that I kissed I know not how oft. With tongue, all the way! Where be your good vibes now? Now get you to my old lady’s chamber and tell her, let her cut a line an inch thick, with that party favor she must come! Aw yeah.

The music:
I can’t be sure I’ve actually heard anything from this demo, but two of the tracks on Myspace (which still exists, believe it or not, and is an invaluable time capsule for us Friars who are occasionally tasked with sampling the least noteworthy bands of the mid 2000s) are dated from 2005, so let’s just assume they were released on the demo in question. Judging from those, Elegy for Eulisza were a not-entirely-terrible melodic death metal band, kind of like a sloppy throwback to early Dark Tranquillity. Their singer, however, is entirely terrible, an inarticulate screamer whose voice might also be distorted by effects. There’s something refreshing in hearing a band attempt rather complex music without incredible precision – nowadays, just about any mistake can be fixed after the fact at even cheap (or home) studios, but I guess in 2005, these guys didn’t have the time or budget to corrections (which reminds me, again, of early Dark Tranquillity, whose music was just a bit too hard for them to play perfectly.) The two later songs on Myspace, from 2007, sound almost like a different band. Though they retain some of the noodly MDM of the 2005 demo, most of the music is instead more like crusty grind. The band may or may not still be together, but it probably doesn’t matter, because they’re clearly not going anywhere.
— Friar Johnsen

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XCURSION, Xcursion (1983, Rampage)

The skull:
This EP is sometimes called Skull Queen for obvious and awesome reasons. Look at this thing! Although it’s obviously a cheap, one-piece plaster replica, the crowned ladyskull with diamond eyes is nevertheless a thing of beauty and a big dumb metaphor to boot (even if it could and should have been framed larger in the shot.) The presumably sumptuous, velvet pillow is icing, but for my money, the element that MAKES this cover is the grid. In the early 80s, “GRID = THE FUTURE” for some reason. Think Tron. Nowadays, you see something like this and you wonder, “What’s the deal with the grid?” but contemporary viewers in 1983 would have accepted it as a signifier that made sense. But even they might have noticed that the grid only goes back like 2 feet and scowled, because the whole point of these things was to suggest an ordered infinity, not a just an ordered few square meters. If nothing else, this Xcursion cover reminds us of the good ol’ days when, if you wanted a skull on your cover, you were just as likely to call a photographer as a painter. Nowadays, if you wanted an infinite grid, you could have it even if you started with this selfsame photo. But back then, budgetary and technological limits were as hard as the men who put skulls on their albums. Maybe even harder.

The music:
Xcursion’s claim to fame is that it was Mark Slaughter’s first band, but don’t hold the man’s subsequent poser activities against him when considering Xcursion, who were actually a fine heavy metal band. Through they hailed from Las Vegas, XCursion remind me more of early L.A. metal bands like Lizzy Borden, 3rd Stage Alert, Malice, etc, not to mention Detroit’s Seduce, whose first album is very much of a piece with Xcursion’s output. Recall, 1983 was before hair metal as we would grow to hate it became its own thing, and back then, legit metal bands might play songs titled, “Love Is Blind,” and even heavy bands would sometimes resort to hard rock stylings. Xcursion were not exactly master musicians, but they got the job done, and while Slaughter lacked the fine control he would later develop over his reedy falsetto, his young voice is nonetheless less shrill here than on “Fly to the Angels” or any of his other execrable hits. If you like early U.S. metal, then you’ll probably get a kick out of this. It’s hardly essential, but once you’ve collected all the classics, this is well worth tracking down. Xcursion’s complete works were “reissued” on Old Metal Records, but that disc is long out of print, and I’d imagine the LPs are even more scarce, so probably blogs and YouTube are your best bet for hearing this curious but of H.M. history.
— Friar Johnsen

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OUROBIGUOUS, An Oath to Forever Defile  (2011, self-released)

The skull:
This skull was unearthed in a Kentucky backwoods, near a settlement of satanic hillbillies who practiced a particularly strange and disturbing ritual. The cult members kill indiscriminately, then suck the victims’ brains out through their ears, using only a bendy straw. They chase the brains with homemade kombucha made with only the most natural ingredients. You thought they drank blood too? C’mon, that’s sick.

The music:
We unearth skulls in many ways, and we’ve collected hundreds, so it’s difficult to remember exactly where we dug this one up. It wasn’t Metal Archives, because this band isn’t listed there. Which seems strange, looking at the album cover, the title of this work, and the skully trappings. But indeed, they are not acknowledged as being metal enough by that great site. Once I finally found this band’s music (bandcamp), I understood why they were passed over for inclusion on M.A. Ourobiguous is just flat-out WEIRD. There is an elements of black metal here (some of the guitar tones and maybe the vocals), but the songs are impossibly fractured pieces of sound, ridiculously angular and completely lacking in flow. And you understand, from the focused attack, that this is absolutely intentional. Disorienting, maniacal, absolutely fucked up and just plain wrong. If A.C. and Orthrelm played Doctor Nerve covers and recorded the rehearsal, it would sound a lot like Ourobiguous. I would never listen to this again, but I will never forget the experience, and I’m very glad to have come across this incredibly odd Illinois unit. Not for everyone. Possibly for no one.
— Friar Wagner

 

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TANK GENOCIDE, Honor and Blood (2012, demo)

The skull:
At least half of the approximately 400 Tank Genocide demos feature a Big Dumb Skull, but we’ve randomly selected only a couple to showcase the band’s commitment to the form. This is actually not even the original cover of this demo – the original featured a viking skull kind of like the one in the band’s (obviously unreadable) logo. The first cover wasn’t as fully skully as this, but I think it’s worth mentioning. Funny how every Tom, Dick, and Varg wants to stake a claim on pseudo-Norse badassery, even when the Dick in question is a French cunt whose pagan ancestors worshipped a pig and the Gallic equivalent of Hermes, god of travel. Swap out the horns on the helmet for wings, and the braided locks for soft Grecian curls, and you’d hit the mark exactly.

The music:
It galls me (ha!) to even acknowledge this shitbag’s existence in print, but my masters in The Council demand it of me, and I obey. This is ultrashitty bedroom Nazi black metal that’s exceptionally bad even by the standards of the genre. It gives me some solace to know that the men who would overturn the world order in order to murder and enslave minorities are so completely incompetent, but it’s still very, very sad to think there’s someone out there who would write a song called “Anders Breivik is a Hero.” Then again, it’s sort of hilarious that someone would record two different versions of said song: the one on this demo is actually “Anders Breivik is a Hero (Version Doom),” because evidently the original tempo wasn’t sufficient to convey Razor’s admiration for one of the most awful people in the world. Razor, by the way, is the nom-de-plume of the fat, chinless, Vichy jizzhole who evidently has nothing better to do with his house arrest than churn out 24 demos in a year. Fuck this guy and fuck every guy like him.
— Friar Johnsen

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TANK GENOCIDE, Devil Temptation  (2013, Infernal Commando)

The skull:
When the head craniologist (no pun intended) handed the intern a skull and a tiny ruler and said “can you get a measurement on that?,” he wasn’t fucking talking about the goddamn teeth. “The bullet hole, stupid, the bullet hole!” Kid’s interning down at the local Stop-n-Shop convenience store now, fucking up counts of cases of Red Bull and boxes of Slim Jim. No rocket scientist, he.

The music:
Tank Genocide is the work of yet another French fruitcake who hates all non-Aryan human beings and releases about 47 cassette demos per year to tell everyone all about it. Anyone who will listen anyway. Which is probably about 14 people. I’m all for sick, fuzzy, ultra-bleak blizzards of black metal noise, but if it’s junk, it’s junk, and this is junk. Not that I have any concern for the welfare of the Nationalist Socialist Black Metal movement, but it would probably not be such an easy-to-dismiss joke if more of the bands were actually good.  With song titles like “Fuck the Pretentious Wankers” (guess that would include me) and “True Black Metal and a Big Dose of Penetration” (’nuff said), it’s possible the guy is not exactly on-topic with Devil Temptation. But then other Tank Genocide releases Aryan Macht, Nordic Heritage and Fascism is Our Ideal – classics all, to be sure! — take up that slack.
— Friar Wagner

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BLASPHMACHINE, Hell (2012, demo)

The skull:
Sometimes I’m absolutely sure I’ve seen a skull before, and this time I was so convinced I had that I went back through the archives to find its dopelganger, to no avail. This bears some passing resemblance to covers by Conqueror and Revenge (and one of the members of Blasphmachine is pictured on Metal Archives in a Revenge shirt, so the similarity is probably not coincidental) but it’s not exactly like anything we’ve seen to date. So, I guess, kudos to Blasphmachine for making the most derivative-seeming but apparently original Big Dumb Skull yet. This is a dubious honor to stake, but bands like this will take their acclaim where they can get it.

The music:
I’m struggling to remember if I’ve ever enjoyed a rehearsal room demo. Nothing comes to mind, and Blasphmachine’s lone demo Hell isn’t changing that. As grindy death metal goes, I’d say they’re not the worst, but when your tunes are a blur of white noise by design, every last bit of fidelity you can achieve in the studio is helpful for turning your blasting nonsense into something resembling music. For some reason, bands that sound like this are always referred to as “black/death metal” but I don’t hear any black metal at all in their sound. Maybe they like Satan, though. Who knows, or cares? Now, Blasphmachine are from Malaysia, and maybe it’s incredibly hard to record a heavy metal demo there, and so maybe they’re to be commended for grinding this out (so to speak), but that doesn’t really help Hell go down any smoother. I’ll give them some points for including some kind of intro on “Bless the Fall,” though; it sounds like they just played some horror movie on the TV in their rehearsal space and recorded it through the air to their boombox. That’s commitment to the bit. But, ironic chuckles notwithstanding, there just isn’t much to recommend this.
— Friar Johnsen

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CLAIRVOYANT, Curse of the Golden Skull (2011, self-released)

The skull:
Seriously? What’s the title of the album? Curse of the White Skull? Is that it? No? Then print the fucking thing in yellow or something! I’m not asking for gold leaf on a self-released CD, but for fuck’s sake, is a little title/image congruity too much to ask for? Unless… maybe the curse of the golden skull is color blindness? Woah.

The music:
I’m not gonna lie: I didn’t expect much from this. I mean, look at it! This has “shitty demo” written all over it. But, it’s a reasonably good slab of Running Wild style power metal. It might even be about pirates, but I don’t really care to examine the lyrics so closely as to find out. It’s a bit rough around the edges, as you might expect, and as cheesy as any Running Wild inspired band has to be, but the music is about 10000000x more professional than the cover art. The singer reminds me a little of Stefan Schmidt, of Jester’s Funeral and Heavatar (and one other band I won’t mention), doing his euro Hetfield thing. He’s got enough range to deliver catchy melodies, and not much more, but he works well with what he has, and fits well with the rigging. The rest of the band have their shit together, too, and the guitarists in particular play well together. After releasing this album, the band changed names to the even worse Wölfrider, but they’ve yet to follow this with another full length. Still, good new power metal is thin on the ground these days, so while you wait for the next Solar Fragment disc, maybe these Poles are worth checking out.
— Friar Johnsen

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OBÚS, Pega con Fuerza (1985, Chapa)

The skull:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is how they did it before Photoshop: with scissors and glue. Why isn’t the skull chromed like the pipes? Because that’s not the skull they had to work with. This looks a bit like an art project from a grade-school kid, albeit a kid with odd aesthetic sensibilities, and I bet it still probably cost some Spanish record label over a million pesetas. But, as a big dumb skull, it’s awesome. Pega con Fuerza translates to “Hits hard” (more or less), and that only makes literal sense with this image if it’s a car grill or something, but whatever. Its figurative impact is great. This can’t be denied.

The music:
You’ve probably never heard of Obús, but they’ve been around since the dawn of time and have released nine full-length albums. They just don’t sing in English. Had they sung in English, they’d be at least as well known as Cannon or Underdog. Imagine an even lighter take on early 80s Priest, (or Def Leppard, even), but sung in Spanish, and you’re imagining Obús. Which is to say: they’re not that bad! The music can be pretty corny, but it’s catchy and very well-sung, and I’m sure the lyrics are fucking terrible, but unless you’re fluent in Español, who cares? Not being able to understand the lyrics is basically the primary upside of listening to foreign-language metal. Anyway, I’m not about to suggest that Obús are some kind of hidden gem; they’re still fairly cheesy, and finding their stuff is probably more trouble than it’s worth (if you demand more than a YouTube video, at least), but if you can’t get enough of vaguely poppy mid 80s metal, and you thought you already had it all, then maybe you need some Obús in your collection.
— Friar Johnsen

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WHITE SKULL, Under This Flag (2012, Dragonheart)

The skull:
If you were met on the field of battle by an army of zombies bearing a giant fucking skull flag, you’d crap your pants and die on the spot. And that’s before the skulls in berets showed up. In the end, this particular branch of special forces was disbanded because by the time they showed up, everyone was already dead. Sometimes, a skull is just too badass.

The music:
White Skull are a fairly terrible Italian power metal band who just won’t go away. They’ve got about 600 albums, and they’re all bad. The thing that sets them apart from most terrible Italian power metal bands (which are legion) is singer Federica de Boni, who is like a female Chris Boltendahl, and evidently the only thing that’s worse than Boltendahl’s voice is his womanly equivalent’s. The music is reasonably well played, I guess, but the riffing is so fucking generic and uninspired that it almost makes me long for the comparative mastery of Hammerfall. To top it all off, Under This Flag boasts the sound of a mid 90s Underground Symphony album. It’s rotten all around, and to be avoided.
— Friar Johnsen

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AOSOTH, Our Crown of Sins (2012, Inferna Profundus)

The skull:
I guess it doesn’t quite work to call a simple picture of a massively deformed skull “classy,” but the longer I do these reviews, the less language seems to mean anything anymore. It’s a bit hard to tell up from down on this skull, which looks almost like a photorealistic painting, but is probably just a very nicely done Photoshop job. In any case, the artist surely just concocted in his imagination the contours of this unfortunate skull, and the effect is pleasingly jarring. At first glance, you just see a skull, but on closer inspection you realize this skull is completely fucked up. Unsurprisingly, “Aosoth” seems to have some occult meaning, so maybe this skull represents some figure in the made-up evil mysticism the band (probably) claims to endorse, but regardless, it’s genuinely creepy, and a job well done.

The music:
Pretty typical French black metal, a little like early Deathspell Omega (that is, pre-Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice), although not even that good. The pace is almost totally unrelenting (although there is some respite from the blasting on side B of this single), and while the expected French quirk is there, it (sadly) rears its head so rarely that you’d be forgiven for thinking these guys were Swedish. The playing is tight, at least, and the production clean enough to not totally annoy. There’s nothing happening in either of these songs to make me want to investigate the band further, but they have the surface qualities of a black metal band who might NOT suck, so if you’re really into this sort of thing, perhaps further investigation is required. Me, I’ll pass.
— Friar Johnsen