SKULL666

KAT, 666 (1986, Polmark)

The skull:
Here it is, a skull so perfectly apt that no other could possibly end our epic investigation into the life and times of the Big Dumb Skull, although as you shall learn, this was perhaps fated from long ago. This album was originally released in 1986 with a different, and far inferior, cover, but when the band self-released a cassette reissue of the album in 1993 (what the fuck, Poland?) this new image was selected to grace it. At the time, the band said the replacement was necessary to better fit the different dimensions of a cassette cover, but it has long been rumored that The Council of the Elders of the Skull personally visited the band and suggested this cover, telling Kat (which is Polish for “executioner,” not “cat”) that the change would bring them great glory and renown in the then distant-seeming future. To their eternal credit, Kat agreed, although in fairness who would dare to deny a request from The Council? And lo, these many years later, their obedience has been duly rewarded, and their fame forever secured, as that very cover graces the last entry on Big Dumb Skulls.

The music:
Kat were one of the earliest, and then one of the biggest, bands of the Polish metal scene, along with Dragon and Turbo. 666 is the Polish-language version of the band’s debut, Metal and Hell, and this early material is driving heavy metal, bordering on speed at times, with a serious German influence, sounding a lot like Warrant, Iron Angel, or Exhumer, but honestly I prefer Kat to any of those bands. At their best, they sound considerably more evil than their better-known German peers, and at their worst, well, they’re a bit less goofy. If you’re not familiar with any of those groups, then imagine a bunch of Poles trying to make early Accept sound sinister. A lot of the early albums from these seminal Eastern European metal bands (eg: my beloved Aria and Arakain) sound a lot better than you might expect, and this is no exception. It’s not that it’s a sterling-sounding affair, but it can certainly compete with most of the underground stuff from 1986 that you’re probably familiar with. And as always, you can expect a better delivery from the vocalist on the native-language version of the album. Plus, Polish is a pretty cool metal language. Is this the hidden classic you’ve been looking for all your life? Not likely. It is pretty great, though, if you like that mid 80s Teutonic style, and you don’t mind looking a little harder for your tunes than usual.

The postscript:
Though we serve at the discretion of The Council, and we Friars are eternally at their beck and call, we must also give thanks for their magnanimity and charity, for they recognize that the task they set before us, though an honor, taxes us greatly in body and spirit, and they have granted us a period of rest, a respite from the demands of The Skull, and Friar Wagner and I shall return now to the cloistered sanctuary of The Council’s compound to spend our days in quiet contemplation, studiously avoiding any and all skulls until such time as our fragile minds have recovered. But fear not, faithful readers, for we shall not abandon this site altogether, and indeed some day we will begin posting anew, for our work is hardly done. Be you not mistaken that there are only 666 Big Dumb Skulls in the world. They are legion. And The Council of the Elders of the Skull, and we its loyal Friars (and all those who follow after we are gone), shall forever pursue and glorify all things big, dumb, and skully.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL665

SEVENTH ANGEL, Heed the Warning – Live (2005, Bombworks)

The skull:
What we have here is a Photoshop catastrophe that could only grace the cover of a thrown-together compilation. Although I applaud the band for selecting only flying Vs, and only Jacksons at that (even if one of them is a King V, of which I generally disapprove, and with a fixed bridge no less!), they could have found better than these bottom-of-the-barrel imports, especially as they clearly just grabbed these jpgs off the ‘net somewhere. The skull is muddled and ugly, and the background went at least four Photoshop filters too far. But to me, the most confusing aspect of the whole thing is the radiation symbol. This is a Christian band, so you’d assume that the epynomous warning has something to do with sin or Jesus or something, and not… nuclear war, which, by 2005, was already a pretty distant threat. But hey, no one ever accuses Christians of timeliness, so I guess it makes as much sense as we could expect. And half of the music on the album is from around 1990, so maybe this title is just short for Did You Heed The Warning? You Did? Great! Then I Guess Everyone Gets To Live.

The music:
Seventh Angel are a long running Christian thrash band who are not as good as the best of their kind (Believer, basically), but who can hang pretty comfortably with the likes of Tourniquet and Deliverance, which is to say they’re not that good, but they’re also not completely horrible. Seventh Angel have always hung their hook on their “doom” aspect, but I think you’d have to have lived a pretty sheltered musical life to call this doom metal. Of course, a lot of Christian thrash fans DO live pretty sheltered musical lives, so it all makes sense. Yes, there are slightly more slow parts in your typical Seventh Angel tune, but there are tons of thrash bands who slow it down just as much, and nearly as often, and no one would ever call them doom. In any case, this release is a compilation containing a four track demo from 1990 and some live tracks recorded Lord knows when. They don’t appear to be mixed at all, but as soundboard recordings go, the quality is perfectly fine, and the band is tight enough that you won’t hear many mistakes. You also won’t hear a lot of great music, because that’s not what put Seventh Angel on the map, but if you only jam for the lamb, and you like your metal a little more rugged than Sacred Warrior, then you almost certainly aren’t reading this blog, and if you were, you’d almost certainly already own this, so why go on?
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL663

TOXIC TWINS, Menace to Unity (1997, Brennus)

The skull:
This is surely just a photo of the underside of a skateboard from the 80s, right? What else could it possibly be? It’s pretty cool, in that very-low-rent Pushead knockoff kind of way, even if the riveted metal motif doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If anything, the fastened-together look more like a defense, rather than a menace, of unity. But anyway, the bandana is a nice touch, and I’m sure that if this guy’s jaw is open to speak, the word he’s speaking is, “Gnarly!” or its Corsu equivalent.

The music:
You’d think, with a name and a cover like this, that Toxic Twins would be some mid-grade new thrash band, but you’d be wrong. In fact, this Corsican (!!!) act have been around since at least 1994, and this, their second album, is a surprisingly interesting historical curiosity. The main vibe I get is “LA 1986,” as Toxic Twins sound like nothing so much as a cross between Warrior and Motley Crue, although that glammy base is leavened by a bit of the weirdness you’d sometimes get from bands like Saigon Kick or Warrior Soul. If that list of names does nothing for you, I can assure you, aside from Warrior (whom I love), it does little for me, but Toxic Twins blend it all up in a mid 80s stew that is nonetheless fairly enjoyable. The music isn’t especially heavy, but it’s definitely metal, and the glammier aspects feel more vestigial than intentional. I have no idea who is singing (basically all of the members are credited with vocals) but most of the lead vocals are sung by just one guy, and he sounds a lot like Warrior’s Perry McCarty, minus the upper end of McCarty’s (once) astounding range. This midrange rasp is put to great use, and some catchy melodies are eked out of not a lot of notes. There are a couple longer passages sung by another guy, and he’s not nearly as good, even if he isn’t terrible. My main complaint with Menace to Unity is that it rarely really gets going, and by the end of the disc, all the mid-tempo tunes start to blend together, but this was a serious problem across the board in melodic (non-power) metal in the mid 90s, and the tunes here are generally strong enough to overcome this as a serious handicap. While the other two Toxic Twins albums appear to be long out of print, evidently Musea (of all labels) reissued this about a decade ago and it’s still available. Supposedly the band is still around, but their last release came out in 2008, so who knows? But, this album is sufficiently good that I think I’m going to have to spend a little time trying to track down those other albums, if only digitally, because there’s some chance that they might be pretty good.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL661

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, 13 (2013, Suicidal)

The skull:
If I told you about an album with a skull smashing through a brick wall as the cover, you’d immediately, and not unjustly, assume it would have to be the most cliched thing possible, not even fit for a bad tattoo. And yet, the actual execution of this cover positively screams, “Suicidal!” There’s no mistaking the skull as belonging to anyone BUT Mike Muir, and the rich detail of all the embedded words (mostly lyrics and song titles) elevates this skull from generic to utterly specific. I mean, it’s still a Big Dumb Skull (and a really big, really dumb one at that) but while most BDS bands could swap covers without anyone noticing, this skull pledges his allegiance to ST and no one else, which is nothing to sneeze at. And at least they didn’t top the skull with one of those hats with the brim flipped up.

The music:
When I was a young Friar, I was very seriously into Suicidal Tendencies. Their superb crossover classic, How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today (still one of the greatest titles of all time) came out right when I started getting into metal as a crabby teenager, and it struck a chord. Although they started as a punk band, this album was more or less pure thrash, albeit thrash tempered by the unique vocal stylings of mainman Mike Muir, who looked a whole lot tougher than he sounded (and I mean that in a good way – Muir’s cholo with a heart of gold persona was a large part of his charm). I still love that album, and the EP Feel Like Shit… Deja Vu (another great title), but my devotion waned for Lights Camera Revolution (with its ridiculous excess of slap bass, courtesy of new member and braid enthusiast Robert Trujillo), and I had more or less lost interest by Art of Rebellion. The writing got less and less interesting, the songs leaned more and more on Muir’s goofy schtick and Trujillo’s funk fetish, and when godlike guitarist Rocky George finally decamped for Fishbone (after a couple more truly uninspired ST albums), I left the band for dead, although they did fart out a couple more truly bad albums in the late 90s/early 00s. I seem to recall hearing that Muir suffered from some health issues after that which sidelined him from the music biz, but he finally put a new band together and 13 is the result. Now, despite my great affection for them in the late 80s, I never saw them back then live, so when they came around last year in advance of 13‘s release, I decided to go, and when they opened with “Smash It!”, a truly excellent new tune, I felt like maybe ST was back! Sadly, as the evening progressed, I felt less and less sure of that comeback, and in the end I left a little early because I was started to get truly bored. Cyco Miko had put together another impressive band (drummer Eric Moore in particular stands out as a monster – check him out in the fusion metal supergroup T.R.A.M.), but for all his efforts in obtaining the most overtalented musicans, Muir had failed to recruit anyone who could write worth a damn. Still, that “Smash It!” tune was great on stage, so when the album finally came out, I gave it a listen and was sorely disappointed. The production is weirdly powerless (especially the guitars) and Mike’s vocals wimpier than usual, and all the energy from the live presentation was missing. And that song is easily the best on the disc! Overall, the style is fairly similar to the thrash of the late 80s, tempered with a bit more of their historical hardcore, and an admittedly impressive amount of dynamics. “Smash It!” is still okay, despite its weakness, and there are a few other decent tunes (“Whose Afraid?” for instance) but the overall vibe is rather torpid. 13 is not a horrible album, and it’s not even close to the worst the band has produced (it’s probably not even in the bottom half), but ST’s discography is so weak overall that even a relatively good album by their standards could reek outright. This doesn’t reek, but it’s dull, and really, dull is about the last thing you expect from Mike Muir. I wish I could say that all it would take for ST to reclaim the crossover throne is a reunion with George and classic rhythm player Mike Clark, but those guys were on more bad albums than good, so it’s probably time for me to just admit that How Will I Laugh and Feel Like Shit were weird flukes and nothing more.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL659

SEOL, Üdvözlégy a Seolban (2007, demo)

The skull:
Is that a horn or… what is that? What the fuck is wrong with this skull? Is that just a massive third eye socket or something? Is this the skull of a deformed monster? The bed of leaves he’s sitting on and the nicely arranged candles make me think of some ridiculously decorated table at a holiday party. But not Halloween. That would be too obvious. I think it’s probably Thanksgiving, and the hostess who conjured this bizarre tablescape happens to hate all of her guests, with a deep and pervasive loathing, and she can’t wait until she pulls off the skull’s top to reveal the boiled organ meat inside which is the one and only course at dinner.

The music:
The only Seol music I could find is a couple of tracks on the band’s long-abandoned Myspace page, and hilariously, they’re both intros, including the intro to this demo. I love the idea that back in the heyday of Myspace (or at least back in 2007 when this demo came out and Myspace wasn’t completely irrevelant), Seol figured that a minute and a half of slowed-down sound effects and moaning was a good introduction to the band for curious listeners. Then again, it’s pretty clear from just those intros that Seol are a shitty low-fi black metal band, and maybe that’s all the info their theoretical potential fans would need to become interested. While I applaud the audacity of that assumption, I can’t say that I’ve been converted to the Seol cause by some spooky wind noises, but your mileage may vary.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL657

NIGHTSIDE GLANCE, Twilight Visions of the Night (2005, demo)

The skull:
There’s a whole lot of “night” happening here, and I love the idea of “twilight visions of the night.” It’s like a glimpse into the future, but only an hour or so into the future. This seems to be an alternate or reissue cover, as the original has no skull but instead a pair of glaring eyes, rendered with just slightly more artistry than the Invader cover. That cover also featured a lot of lightning, and also a bit more of a twilight feel, but who needs thematic purity when you can have a skull? This guy looks like he’s auditioning to be a stuntskull for an Iced Earth cover or something, and he hardly seems interested in either twilight or glancing, but at least he’s putting in some effort, which is more can be said for a lot of the skull models we’ve seen.

The music:
This is straight-up Dimmu Borgir/Old Man’s Child worship from Belarus. I guess you’d call it “symphonic black metal” but there’s not very much here that qualifies as black metal in the traditional sense. There are a few more 6/8 parts than usual, and the vocals are croaky instead of gurgly, and maybe the lyrics are about Satan, although they’re probably just about the night. What you do get are a lot of cheesy keyboards and a powerful evocation of 1997, when this sort of thing was all the rage. If Born of the Flickering is your favorite album of all time and you collect anything that sounds like that, then you probably already own this, along with like 3000 similar discs, but on the off chance your trading network didn’t extend too far into the former Soviet bloc, then I guess now’s the time to right that wrong and pick up some Nightside Glance.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL655

ATTAXE, Displaced (1989, demo)

The skull:
It’s the sleepy eye that makes this cover, as if the skull were thinking to himself, “I got out of bed for this?” Attaxe’s demo before this one also features a less big, but possibly more stupid stull, and I like to think that this guy was the model for that as well. He moved out to California to star in horror movies, but the only work he could find besides waiting tables was appearing on three track cassettes from bands who would never amount to much. It’s no wonder he wasn’t able to muster any more enthusiasm, especially when for this shoot he had a big-ass logo dropped on his head, and those swords were sharp! If the rent hadn’t been due in a couple days, he might not have showed up, but as it was, he didn’t have much choice.

The music:
Attaxe were yet another thrash band who were born too late; though their demos were pretty good, they were only just hitting their stride when the metal scene collapsed in the early 90s. This 1989 demo is a nice piece of Bay Area-style thrash (although Attaxe were from Southern California) that reminds me of a lesser Vio-lence. Though well played and unusually well produced for a demo, Displaced is not exactly brimming with original ideas, and Tim Carson’s unnuanced, bellowing vocals (which are clearly modeled after Chuck Billy’s) sell the music a bit short. Still, there’s a lot more going on here than you’ll hear from most new thrash bands, and while (to my knowledge) the Attaxe discography has never been reissued, the band maintains a nice historical webpage where you can hear most, if not all, of their recorded output. If you’re seriously into thrash, you’re sure to get something out of the experience of digging through their archives (and as they went through a lot of singers, some of the demos feature better vocals than the ones here), but if your relationship with thrash is more casual, then it’s unlikely that Attaxe is going to make you fall in love with the genre at last.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL654

LEPROUS, Coal (2013, Inside Out)

The skull:
As kids, we all learn that diamonds are compressed coal, although as it turns out, that’s not true at all, at least in the case of most diamonds. Probably a long time ago, the lesson was simply that diamonds are made of the same stuff as coal (they’re just carbon, after all), but over time, overeager and undercurious elementary school teachers probably confused the relationship. This cover is an attempt to extrapolate the degeneration of this misinformation into the far future, when kids the world over will learn that diamonds are made when a crystal skull chews up coal and vomits out gems. Children who ask how the skull is animated can expect one of two answers. The smarter dumb teachers will explain that the skull is only a metaphor for metamorphic processes. The dumber dumb teachers will say “Jesus.”

The music:
Leprous’s 2011 full-length, Bilateral is one of the greatest prog metal albums of all time, and a shot in the arm of a moribund scene that has primarily calcified into third generation Dream Theater knockoffs in a race to sound the most like a power metal band. Through clearly indebted to the eclecticism of early Pain of Salvation, Bilateral is its own beast, a frantic, technical, sometimes bewildering brew of everything great in prog metal. It’s an album so good that to attempt to top it on its own terms would be a folly, and it seems that Leprous realized as much, because Coal strikes off in entirely new directions while still sounding somehow of a piece with the band’s earlier work. Mostly abandoning the frenetic riffery of Bilateral (and to a lesser extent, Tall Poppy Syndrome), Coal instead ventures to progress vocally, and indeed the entire album, more or less, rests on the shoulders of keyboardist and singer Einer Solberg, whose voice started off pretty great and has evolved into something close to a wonder of the metal world. There are long acapella sections, intricate counterpunctual melodies, and deep explorations of vocal ideas. Obviously heavy metal has a long traditional of athletic vocal performances, but I can’t offhand think of another prog metal band who have invested so much energy in the cultivation of a unique approach to vocals. From the very first track, it’s clear that Leprous are working at something new. Not every fan of the band was pleased by this. Many complained that there are too many “oohs” and “aahs” and other weird vocalizations, and indeed there are many, so many that I think the band must have had provocation in mind when they went down this path. But I for one find the subtle and intricate permutations of Solberg’s melodic choices to be almost trance-inducing. At the very least, I find the vocals sufficiently engaging that I don’t miss the crazy guitarwork of albums past in the least, and in fact the deep, Tool-inspired grooves and novel textures conjured by guitarists Tor Oddmund Suhrke and Øystein Landsverk are exactly the right bed for Solberg’s singing. The album’s single track, “The Cloak,” for instance, is more or less a four minute expansion of a single vocal hook, but it’s a hook so powerful that it could easily support another four minutes, no solos of wanking needed. Coal is not for everyone, nor even for a large part of the historical audience for prog metal, whose taste and spirit of adventure have largely withered along with the ambitions of most of the scene’s onetime frontrunners. It’s time to ditch Dream Theater for good and follow bands like Leprous to hear the future of prog metal.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL651

GRIMLAIR, Au Commencement De L’Ombre (2009, Self Mutilation Services)

The skull:
This faded, ghoulish fellow looks at first glance to be wearing some kind of hood or cowl, but in fact it’s a mortarboard, worn insouciantly far back on his dome. If that doesn’t make any sense, perhaps you didn’t realize that the proper English title of this release should be “At the Commencement of the Hombre,” but due to some confusion as to how to operate Google Translate, it came out (in French) as The Beginning of Shadow. It’s a mistake anyone could have made.

The music:
You’d never guess that this is one-man bedroom black metal, would you? Oh, you would? What gave it away? Oh, right. Everything. This is raw and awful, but I think it’s supposed to sound raw and awful. It’s not that Cadavre (the one-man) is totally incompetent, it’s just that he loves terrible music, and is very good at recreating the shit he likes. I’ll give him a couple extra points, even, for playing real drums, even if it kinda sounds like he’s playing them at the same time as the guitars, the way it used to work in one-man bands. Anyway, if you like shitty, sloppy, drenched-in-verb black metal, then maybe you’ll like this. I mean, who knows? People with rotten taste are hard to predict.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL649

CHAINSAW, Permanent Menace (2011, Metalizer)

The skull:
This skull is so fucking tough his lower jaw is a god damned chainsaw! Sure, the background is ghastly and the Photoshop work is abysmal (the horns and the handle of the saw seem to occupy the same space, for instance) but I’m gonna let that all slide, because this artist wasn’t ‘shopping in a snake or some fire – he was ‘shopping in a motherfucking chainsaw. It’s utterly ridiculous, and also implausibly original, as we’ve never seen anything like this here at Skull HQ, which is a higher and higher bar to clear every day. Well played, Chainsaw art dude. Well played.

The music:
I expected bad Russian rethrash, but this is in fact some proper oldschool German thrash. Chainsaw were active in the 80s and released one full length before disbanding, but this disc is apparently an unreleased second album. Maybe these were just demos, but they sound good enough to have been final recordings for an album meant to come out in 1989, although I suspect the source for this was an old cassette of a rough mix or something, as the quality from track to track is not totally consistent. The music is fast and tight, sounding like a cross between Blackfire-era Sodom and Testament, which is a combination I wouldn’t have imagined before but works quite well. It’s neither technical nor barbaric, but something in between, and there’s no denying this was made in the 80s. I like it! This is one of the better lost thrash albums I’ve heard, and it makes me curious about the band’s earlier work, which features awesome cover art of a totally different sort, the kind of drawing that would make Vortex proud.
— Friar Johnsen