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

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

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

SKULL586

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

 

SKULL584

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

SKULL578

EVIL ARMY, I, Commander  (2013, Hells Headbangers)

The skull:
We’ve seen this motif before, the guns, the helmet, the sneering grin of a skull so maniacal that no rubbery flesh could corral the madness within. War, violence, insanity…we’ve seen all that before too. The simplistic stencil-logo and bored-in-study-hall drawing for the album cover. Been there, done that. Is there nothing left for a skull to do that a skull hasn’t already done zillions of times before? We have to wonder if the music is going to illuminate us in a way this cover definitely does not. We have our doubts.

The music:
This is a three-song 7″ release, each song borrowing heavily from Persecution Mania-era Sodom. Tight, rabid riffs, dive-bombing solos, artillery-fire drumming, and caustic vocals that spit fire just like Tom Angelripper. It’s adequate, and the part of me that totally loves Persecution Mania has to give this a pass. The record is well-rounded, the playing full of passion and ability, the writing better than most playing at this game. Shades of Tankard and At War are heard too, but really, it’s 99% worship of a very specific era of a very specific band. It’s a cool, compact eight minutes and 17 seconds. By third song “I Must Destroy You,” you kind of have to laugh to yourself at the ridiculously single-minded purpose here, like, “This is all you’ve got?” — even if what they’ve got is pretty good. I’d be real surprised if each of the members of Tennessee’s Evil Army didn’t have at least three different iterations of Persecution Mania in their collection.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL576

VISE MASSACRE, Expendable Humans  (2012, self-released)

The skull:
It was just a few short years ago that the kid who would go on to be the drummer of Vise Massacre sat there in art class, despondent in front of a lump of clay. Then the lightbulb went on — he swiftly fashioned the grimmest clay head the teacher had ever seen. Raiding the teacher’s desk, lunchbox and supply cabinet in an inspired frenzy, he tossed together an unholy assemblage of clay, oatmeal, Chicklets gum and covered the mess in sticky white paint. Behold!!!

The music:
A bunch of hootin’ and hollerin’ happenin’ on this 15-song album from New York City’s Vise Massacre. Not sure which borough they hail from, but I’m guessing Brooklyn. And if I had to put money on an even more exact location, I’d go with…um…let’s go with Williamsburg. So, Expendable Humans looks like punk/death/grind/crust on the surface, and that’s the basic ballpark, but it’s much less noisy and far cleaner than I imagined it would be going in. Imagine a well-recorded, modern, streamlined Amebix re-recording the Monolith album, with Napalm Death’s Danny Herrera on drums and  a vocalist who took the style of Believer’s Kurt Bachman (in the Sanity Obscure era) and intensified it by a thousand. There you have Vise Massacre. There’s a technical element to some of this that makes it stand out from the legions of other bands aligning themselves with NYC crust/grind/death/punk, as heard in the precision-controlled tumult of “Eyes of Fire.” The brief English Dogs-ish guitar breaks in “Hail to the Wicked” are pretty cool too. There are some good riffs scattered throughout, and it manages to keep the interest most of the way through, but Expendable Humans wears out its welcome near the end. And the vocals become tiresome by the fifth song or so, but at least Vise Massacre aren’t as typical as their name, album title and imagery promises. That’s something.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL574

TRUST, Man’s Trap  (1984, CBS)

The skull:
It’s like grandmother always said: “Behind every skull with deplorable teeth is a goofy chameleon with attitude.” Your gramma did say that, right? Mine did! Perhaps she was repeating some poorly translated proverb from some medieval French playwright, handed down over generations. That explains why it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Whatever the case, Trust captured this existential idea on this fine piece of album cover “art.” The “Man’s Trap” toe-tag had to go on a tooth, since the skull is obviously lacking toes. A tooth-tag for a toeless skull. There’s a sentence you don’t read every day. This cover is way more surreal than it seems to be at first glance. I need to lay down for a spell…

The music:
RIYL: Boss, Rose Tattoo, Coney Hatch. IDNL: Boss, Rose Tattoo, or Coney Hatch, so I do not like Trust either. This French band would have remained in the limbo of semi-obscurity were it not for Iron Maiden’s heavy endorsement back in the early and mid ’80s. Interestingly, Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain played in this band prior to joining the mighty Maiden, and lookee here: Clive Burr plays on this album. Let’s get this out of the way: Trust sounds nothing like Iron Maiden. Nothing I’ve ever heard by Trust sounded remotely appealing, actually, and the sleazy bar-rock all over Man’s Trap is no better than the junkiest of junky NWOBHM bands. The vocalist’s sneering, scratchy delivery reminds way too much of Nicky Moore (Samson, Mammoth) meshed with Biff Byford (a vocalist I have never liked, although it seems everyone else in the world does), and he crumples the lyrics together into a huge mess of unintelligible English. For this album, Trust realized French isn’t a very good language for singing hard rock, although the English-sung Trust is hardly better. Musically it’s sub-AC/DC hard rock scrap. Occasionally a bit or bob will appeal, as with the great riff underneath the final solo in “Uptown Martyrs.” But god, the vocalist sucks, and I’ll pay you 20-spot if you can get through songs like “’84” and “Fireball” without vomiting.
— Friar Wagner

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

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