Author Archives: Friar Wagner

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MORDARK, Fuerza de la Oscuridad  (2000, self-released)

The skull:
This guy is ready for war. His eyes are piercing and alight with murderous intent. His grin is not one of happiness but of maniacal bloodthirst. (It’s a mouthful of choppers that any dentist would give their lateral incisor to work on.) How can we tell this skull’s up to no good? That ancient battle helmet! We’ll assume the horns are attached to the headpiece, because if they were actually part of his skull, it would be impossible to get that war-cap on his head.

The music:
I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but these Spaniards sound a lot like Tiamat in the Astral Sleep era. Descriptions of them as “black heavy metal” are accurate. The stuff is as angular and poorly recorded as Tiamat’s material from that era, but lacks all the eccentricity and ingenuity. Mordark gets a little more “true metal” sounding at times (the middle of “Almas Negras,” which is like early Slayer meets Iron Maiden, but played very very poorly). This album is generally too clunky and derivative for its own good, but they give it the old college try. They’re onto something, I’m just not sure it would be all that interesting even if it was better written and performed. This recording is from the earlier part of their career, and apparently they’re still around so let’s assume they’ve improved by now…
— Friar Wagner

SKULL198

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INTERMENT, Where Death Will Increase 1991-1994  (2010, Necroharmonic)

The skull:
Where will death increase? Where will it decrease? Where does it stay the same? These are burning questions in Interment’s world, a world where skulls scream the question into the void rather than discussing the matter in a more civil manner. This skull, however, screams not, nor does he even talk, as he is gagged with a ring and primed for use as a totally bad-ass door knocker.

The music:
I don’t know about death itself, but death metal certainly increased between 1991 and 1994, especially if you’re talking about the number of shitty bands around in 1994 compared to 1991. Doubtless many of us into the first and best wave of Swedish death metal discovered a few previously overlooked gems since revival in interest found tons of second- and third-tier bands from the first era having their demos and albums reissued in more recent years. My most satisfying discovery of  an old band like that was Toxaemia, but Interment don’t spark the interest the way that band does. If you’d never heard brutal Swedish death metal before, Interment would definitely impress, but listeners who missed them the first time will likely acknowledge their competence and quickly move onto something a little fresher. Their sound recalls Dismember most, which means it also sounds a lot like early Entombed, but it’s got the thickness and tempo variety of early Therion and a bit of an early Unleashed thing going on too. This release compiles their three demos dating between 1991 and 1994; note that the first demo not only bore the same name as this comp, but featured the very same door knocker. In 2010 they released their very first full-length album, Into the Crypts of Blasphemy (as opposed to the crypts of rays), and they sound exactly the same there as on these early recordings. They’re consistent, that’s for sure.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL196

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PHYNE THANQUZ, Into the Sun / Curse of the Gods 7″  (1982, ERC)

The skull:
Lookit this crazy man, still trying to hold onto his youth by keeping his shaggy black locks even though he’s pretty much dead. Silly hippie. He holds a crucifix and glares evilly into your eyes. A grim visage! An unholy scion of death! A piece of artwork tailor-made for some ridiculously obscure NWOBHM 7″! Another look and it’s more like some kinda Halloween Pez dispenser.

The music:
Next to Squashed Pyrannah, Phyne Thanquz is my favorite NWOBHM band name. And, like the Pyrannah, they are barely metal. Fine Thanks (in human vernacular) are, rather, among the many bands who dragged their ’70s influences/origins into the 1980s and went with heavy metal looking artwork. Their sound is like Max Webster meets early Blue Oyster Cult in a dingy Birmingham pub, with Jon Lord sitting in on organ. It’s a bit dodgy, overall, but you have to admire the energy and spirit found on these two tracks, and  there’s just enough of a whiff of bands like Vardis (the momentum), Satan (the vocals) and Legend (the ’70s aesthetic) that they might as well be rightfully lumped into the NWOBHM movement.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL194

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DIVINE EMPIRE, Nostradamus  (2003, Century Media)

The skull:
In the U.S., this was released by Olympic with a different cover, a bunch of skeletal remains, so we applaud Century Media Germany for releasing it over there with the only skeletal remain that matters. The skull sits in the foreground against a backdrop of one very dark night, or perhaps any given day of a nuclear winter — the black could be ash and other pollution permeating that distant collection of ruins. The dried blood in the eye sockets is disturbing. So, just what does this cover have to do with Nostradamus, the seer? Who knows. Maybe it’s his very skull? Or maybe in all his witchy mystic seeing, Nostradamus used a skull to divine the future. Divine…Nostradamus…waitaminute, have I stumbled upon Divine Empire drawing a clever and subtle line from their band name to the prophecies of Nostradamus? Nah, probably not.

The music:
Bread-and-butter, nothing-special death metal right here. It’s what Divine Empire have always specialized in. Might as well be a latter-day Malevolent Creation album for all I can tell. If competently played death metal is something you can’t get enough of, even if it is of the totally flavorless variety delivered here, then go for it.
— Friar Wagner

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BROCAS HELM, Blood Machine / Skullfucker (1999, self-released)

The skull:
This skull faces to his right and oozes a blood-like gel (the Hasbro Blood Machine?). Quite miraculously, this gel congeals to form the word “Skullfucker” below him. It’s probably supposed to look bad-ass, but really looks more like a skull dripping red cake frosting from his lower jaw. Let’s get him a spot on America’s Got Talent.

The music:
The not-very-prolific Brocas Helm offered this two-song single in 1999, and while some prior recordings held some impressive moments, these two songs don’t number among their strongest material. They’ve got a manic momentum with some weird vocals and prominent bass playing, and the overall performances are excellent, as is the Brocas Helm standard. They certainly have a sound like no other — at least until The Lord Weird Slough Feg came along and co-opted their approach. “Skullfucker” is the better of the two songs, but ultimately these are two forgettable tunes, which is too bad, because this band can do better than this and usually does.
— Friar Wagner

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SPEED KILL HATE, Acts Of Insanity (2004, Listenable)

The skull:
Originally released by the band with a non-skull cover, this album was quickly picked up by Listenable and graced with a skull. But hold off on the rejoicing, because this is one stock, boring, lame-ass skull cover. Where have we seen this before? Everywhere! Crossbones, flames, Iron Cross, appropriately dumb skull…all of it revealing that, no, Speed Kill Hate had no decent ideas whatsoever for a cover concept and went with this exercise in generic numbskullery. Acts Of Inanity, more like…

The music:
A band featuring members of Overkill, M.O.D. and Bronx Casket Company isn’t anything that’s gonna get this particular Friar all that psyched. When this debut came out, I avoided it entirely — nine years later I’m finally listening to it as per my duties here at Big Dumb Skulls. It’s exactly how I thought it would sound: grooving, aggressive post-thrash that is only for fans of those late ’90s/early 2000s Overkill albums, the most Pantera-esque Annihilator material, and Pantera themselves. Metal for the gullible and easily entertained. At any rate, it ain’t for me. Neither is that album cover. A failure all around, to these ears and eyes.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL188

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BARSHASKETH, Defying the Bonds of Cosmic Thraldom  (2010, Wolfsvuur Records)

The skull:
Standard issue occult-skull stuff, something we’ve seen a few times already: a plain and lonely skull encricled in a ring of occult writing and symbols. White on black. But look closer and the scrawl is actually the wordy title written in an Arabic kind of script. Their logo? The usual black metal band name font. As black metal-looking as it gets without the use of pentagrams and upside-down crosses.

The music:
I don’t defy the bonds of cosmic thralldom often, but when I do, I listen to Barshasketh. This is some pretty okay stuff, nothing amazing, but it presses enough of the right buttons if you like older, rawer, cavernous, crazy-ass sounding black metal. The playing is generally good and the arrangements fairly ambitious. The guitarist struggles with fluidity in the acoustic guitar section of “Illuminated by Shadow,” but they get flying pretty good when they stick to electric guitar, bass and drums. The final section of “Whisper of Abyssal Winds” is a highlight of this 44-minute presentation. Once I got into Deathspell Omega via Kenose and Si Monumentum…, I worked my way back in hopes that their more straight-forward black metal material was interesting, but it wasn’t. This recording by New Zealand’s Barshasketh is more what I was hoping for in that quest. It’s generally pretty insane, otherworldly-sounding stuff. Of the thousands of bands in this mold, Barshasketh are one of the rare ones putting forth something in the traditional mold that’s actually worth some time. It succeeds because it doesn’t draw from just the classic Norwegian style, or the cult Greek style, or American black metal, it instead fuses a bunch of shades and elements of the genre into its own semi-unique take. Bleakness and darkness intended, bleakness and darkness achieved. These guys are okay by me, although Split Enz remains my favorite New Zealand band by a long shot.
— Friar Wagner

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CHTON, Chtonian Lifecode (2004, Retribute)

The skull:
An arty sort of thing here, the skull looking down in apparent despair. We can only speculate where the blood is coming from. Crowns of thorns are popular in metal imagery, so maybe he’s looking down to find the crown of thorns that just fell off his head…but then he’d need some flesh for the crown to produce some bleeding and he’s just a damn skull made of nothin’ but bone so…who can really know? This cover has that confusing thing going on where the album title is flown large at top, making it look like the band’s name is Chtonian Lifecode and the album title is Chton, but no, it’s the other way around. Silly buggers.

The music:
You don’t hear music like this out of Norway very often: death metal apparently influenced by Suffocation and Rottrevore, the kind of tractor-pull noise that I admit a certain fondness for. But you better throw a twist into it, otherwise you’ll be in the shadow of the originators. And while Chton offer an extremely heavy sound that harkens to those acts, they also deliver the occasional wash of dissonant guitar chords and various modernisms, like chunkier chords and rhythms, and a slightly slicker production. So they’re not entirely stuck in the world of early ’90s death metal, but they do use that as a base for their particularly dark, heavy and brutal compositions. I admire what they’re doing here — especially the ungodly heavy bottom end and the Autopsy-like grit — and am curious to check out their second album, which was finally released eight years after this debut. If it’s just a little more interesting than this, then they’re not getting the attention they deserve in this current wave of fondness for old-school death metal. As for Chtonian Lifecode, it slipped by without much impact in 2004, but it’s worth checking out if you’re in the mood for death metal with one foot in the present and another in the good old days.
— Friar Wagner

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EGZEKUTHOR, Hateful Subconsciousness  (1990, demo)

The skull:
From top to bottom this artwork is fun. Try and figure out the logo and what their name means (a play on “executor”? Eggs + executive + Thor?) then work down. Is the skull separating itself from the logo, or crashing into it? Either way he’s got menace in his eyes and looks ready to kill his paintball competition. But he appears to be cracking, and the three paintball splats seem to have caused some of this grief. And he’s got to avoid the fire that burns below (there are a LOT of skull covers depicting fire burning below a skull). What this has to do with having a hateful subconscious is hard to tell, but that would be difficult to convey in a drawing, so the artist did the best he could.

The music:
With the muddy, blurry, echoey recording job, the awesomely named Egzekuthor manages to lend some atmosphere to their fairly standard compositions. This five song, 25-minute demo achieves something a bit above the norm in its class, although it’s yet another “in one ear, out the other” sort of effort. The music itself isn’t bad — there are enough tempo shifts and performance skill to chew on — it’s just that their enthusiasm is greater than their songwriting ability. Their core approach attempts to take what the Big Three of German Thrash Metal did in the ’80s and inject a bit more complexity without going fully “tech,” but not enough highlights emerge from the noisy din screaming “replay me!” In fact, there isn’t a single moment on this demo that does that. So…marvel at the cover and their crazy name and enjoy it for what it is: a barely consequential blip on the radar of Polish metal history.
— Friar Wagner

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OBSERVANT, Corrodead (2010, demo)

The skull:
This skull comes with accompanying crossbones and is rendered a rust color to suggest corrosion. Look at what Observant is trying to convey here: death + corrosion = corrodead. That’s some kinda genius. As a cover and a concept, ain’t nothing going on here.

The music:
Once again we have a skull cover without much to offer and music that’s equally apathetic. Oh sure, Observant might sound like they mean it, but this is utterly unremarkable melodic death metal with some chunky, downtuned grooving added in. The vocals are lower than the norm in this genre, like Monstrosity/Bolt Thrower pitch. Sometimes they’re scratchier or more grating. They almost attain melody in one small part of “Smoke Screen.” None of it is memorable. The musicians have played in other unimportant bands while the vocalist has been fronting Finntroll since 2006. You kinda understand why they’ve not released anything other than this 2010 demo. The other guys: “Hey, vocalist, you wanna come down to rehearsal and work up some new Observant material?” The vocalist: “Nah, I gotta tour the world again and get paid well in Finntroll. Maybe next year?” And so it goes, year after year after year. Don’t look for any new Observant material anytime soon. — Friar Wagner