Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

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BOLT THROWER, Spearhead (1992, Earache)

The skull:
This oddly shaped skull (note the depression in the dome) bears four downward-pointing horns that appear to be of a bony piece with the skull. There’s no bottom jaw, but that’s just as well because it would be hard to fit in all those pointy teeth if they had matches underneath. The ominous, ancient-looking skull floasts atop an eldritch amulet of some sort, intricately worked and featuring a miasmic symbol of eight underneath. It’s the heavy-lidded eye in the center of that star that gives this up immediately as a Bolt Thrower cover. No other band has worked such magic with that otherwise cliched symbol of chaos than Bolt Thrower. One suspects that if they had chosen to go with pentagrams from the start, they could have made even that hackneyed totem classy.

The music:
We Friars in the service of the Council hold many opposing musical positions. Friar Wagner loves Darkthrone, I love Angra. He loves Italian prog rock with ludicrous acronymic names, I love bubblegummy power pop from the 70s. But there is one musical truism in the priory, held above all others by the Council themselves: Bolt Thrower rules supreme. It is permissible, of course, to prefer one Bolt Thrower album over another (although it is universally recognized that Realm of Chaos is the best), and there is room, even, for debate over the merit of Dave Ingram. So, when speaking of Bolt Thrower, it is not necessary to state that a release is good, but only how good. Spearhead is a single/EP released in support of The IVth Crusade, which I generally hold to be a middling album in the band’s mighty discography. On one hand, there’s something to be said for the smoothness of the sound and the greater degree of melodicism in the riffing, but on the other hand, one can’t help but miss the punishing heaviness of Realm or even the band’s (so far) swansong, Those Once Loyal. “Spearhead” is also not my choice for the best song on that album (nor, evidently, the band’s, as they generally only play the title track from that album live anymore) but it’s good enough, even if the “extended remix” does little to improve upon the original. “The Dying Creed” is an excellent number from the album also presented here, with a great dirgey chorus that highlights the unique pessimism of the lyrics on the album as a whole (normally, Bolt Thrower’s war-themed lyrics take a neutral moral position on their subject). The real value in this single, though, is in the two non-album tracks, “Crown of Life” and “Lament.” While I wouldn’t call them the band’s greatest songs, they’re certainly excellent additions to the corpus and a reminder that at one time, the band had too much good material for an album, instead of too little, as the case sadly seems to be now. “Crown of Life” sounds almost like it could have fit on Warmaster, while “Lament” is IVth Crusade through and through, a doomy plod with surprising harmonies and a mournful solo. Both these songs (and the “Spearhead” remix) can be found on the contractually obligated Who Dares Wins which, like Entombed’s self-titled compilation, also uses recycled artwork (this very skull in fact) to front an obligatory assembly of rarities. Buy or die.
— Friar Johnsen

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REIGN, Embrace (1994, Mausoleum)

The skull:
I don’t know who Marco Stohler is, but he sure is good at copying H.R. Giger. The vertebrae, the slimy sheen, the biomechanical nonsense — Stohler has it all down pat, and he’s put that prodigious talent for emulation to excellent work crafting this big dumb skull. It’s hard to call this a bad cover, because it’s a pretty fine painting, but it rates about a 1 on the originality scale.

The music:
And that’s a fair summary of the music, too. Embrace is a British thrash album from 1994, and if that doesn’t make you leery, I don’t know what will. Reign were to late 80s Sepultura what Xentrix were to mid 80s Metallica, although I’ll say I like Xentrix a good deal more than I like Reign. Embrace has a satisfying crunch to the guitars, but the pacing tends to plod (a very common problem with UK thrash), and the singer is completely charmless in the way a lot of last-gasp thrash vocalists were, trying too hard to bridge the gap between their beloved Hetfieldian yarl and the ever more popular death metal growl. This is one of the rare BDS albums that I actually own: the first two Reign albums were staples of discount bins everywhere in the mid 90s, and the cover alone was worth $2 to me. I haven’t listened to this in close to 20 years, probably, and while I remembered it being decidedly mediocre, I guess I’ve mellowed in my old age because this is definitely more enjoyable than my memory allowed. The clunky lurch that is the band’s default tempo gets old quick, but there are more fast parts than I recalled and in general this sounds more or less like the kind of thrash I like, but it never quite gets over the hump. As I’ve said many times, though, this totally forgettable slab of old school thrash is generally much better than all but the best of today’s rethrashers. I will grant that I’ve clearly entered the “get off my lawn” phase of thrash fandom, but that doesn’t make the observation any less true.
— Friar Johnsen

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SODOM, ‘Til Death Do Us Unite  (1997, Sony GmbH)

The skull:
The ridiculousness of this cover edges into the sublime. Assuming the (corny, unclever) title came first, it’s hard to imagine art that could do more to turn it into an almost meaningful phrase, elevate it beyond a half-hearted pun, than this cover does. Yes, it’s fairly absurd, but it must be admitted that part of the reaction to this image is bound up in a societal discomfort with a presentation of nudity that is neither lascivious nor humorous in intent. Something similar can be said about obesity, for while this photograph is not entirely unjudgmental in its view of the man on the left, contrast the sobriety of this picture with the cover of the album two back in the Sodom discography, Get What You Deserve. The symmetry between the two subjects here implicitly dignifies (to some extent) the man, presenting him at the very least without scorn. Forgive this friar for waxing pretentious, though. This is a funny site about skulls (and look at that happy fella, sandwiched between those two big bellies). I know, though, that this cover has come in for a lot of derision over the years, but I do find it incredibly striking and poetic in a way almost completely unknown to heavy metal art. Of course I recognize the silliness at work here, but this is not a joke without value or meaning, and I think to this day that it was a bold and brave decision on the band’s part to use this cover.

The music:
Perhaps the biggest surprise with this album is not the cover per se, but that they chose to so adorn an album that was an obvious effort of rebirth (hence the irony of the title). After sliding in the post-Blackfire years into a kind of crusty, mangy punk metal, this album debuts a new lineup and a (partial) return to the crisp thrash of their late 80s heyday. The easy thing to do would have been to commission a fresh painting of Knarrenheinz (their gas-masked mascot) from Andreas Marschall to announce this stylistic backpedal (see: Kreator’s Violent Revolution), and in fact the “censored” cover art is a very shitty painting in this vein, but by using this photographic cover as they did, Sodom could effectively say, “Yes, we’re playing thrash again, but we’ll still do what we want,” and indeed they do, as this album doesn’t shed, entirely, the punky leanings of the several albums before. That they needed a change was obvious from the moribund Masquerade in Blood, but I happened to like Get What You Deserve a lot, even if the larger metal community did not. Till Death Do Us Unite is in that way a good have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too compromise, and it set the stage for the band’s 00s renaissance, culminating with their self-titled 2006 release. (Their newest album, their best since Better Off Dead, is to me the beginning of a fourth era in the Sodom legacy.) While Destruction and Kreator both managed to accrue some progressive cred in the late 80s, Sodom were always the workhorse of the Teutonic three, but this album demonstrated that to underestimate the band’s wit and vision is a mistake.
— Friar Johnsen

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ENTOMBED, Entombed (1997, Earache)

The skull:
What we have here is a properly cranky looking skull-and-crossbones stamped into some olde-tyme pirate-booty coin. And then the coin is sorta hazily floating over a peeling coat of lead paint, or something? This is a pretty dashed-off affair that actually recycles the coin image from the band’s earlier Stranger Aeons EP, but in much greater detail. I wonder if this coin is an actual thing that was photographed, or if there’s just a single master image that was manipulated to a greater degree to produce the starker EP image? Who knows. It’s a pretty nice skull, but a pretty hacky recycling.

The music:
Collecting a bunch of EPs, singles, and other ephemera, Entombed is certainly one of the better such compilations in metal history. You’ll get your money’s worth just in the Crawl EP tracks, possibly the three greatest recordings in the band’s history and the reasons for the Council allowing such a dubiously unique cover into the Skullection. On that one EP, recorded after LG Petrov left but before Johnny Dordevic was (nominally) recruited to replace him, Crawl is graced with the awesome guest vocals of Nirvana 2002’s Orvar Säfström. He only did these three songs with the band, but he left his mark as their best vocalist, hands down. The title track would appear later on Clandestine, and “Bitter Loss” originally appeared on “Left Hand Path”, but the versions here are fairly different than their earlier and later counterparts, demonstrating the extent to which Entombed refined their songs through time. A third track, “Forsaken,” is also great. In addition to that EP, this comp also includes the aforementioned Stranger Aeons, which is also quite good, and the Out of Hand and Full of Hell EPs from their deathrock phase, which both feature some fairly good cover songs. A couple other single tracks round out the tracklist. All in all, taken on the strength of the individual songs, this is the last essential Entombed release.
— Friar Johnsen

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GANGRENATOR, Imminent Gangrene (2008, demo)

The skull:
Blotchy and slimy, this skull is unduly pleased with himself. “Hey ladies?! Who wants a taste of this?” he beckons, resolutely sure of his game. I especially love how he’s able to cock an eyebrow of pure skull. Evidently a bad case of gangrene will really make your bones mushy.

The music:
Pure 80s-style grindcore a la Napalm Death and Carcass. The drum machine doesn’t much rankle because the sound is authentically bad all around. Reek of Putrefaction is not my go-to Carcass album, but if that’s the one you listen to the most, then you might love Gangrenator, but for sure you own worse. And though it was released in 2008, Imminent Gangrene was pressed only on cassette, so basically, all the work to decide if this is a thing you need has been handily encoded in signifiers for you.
— Friar Johnsen

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PSYOPUS, Odd Senses (2009, Metal Blade)

The skull:
Another sideways skull, this time an x-ray of a skull being drained by humungous mosquitoes. Plus some crazy, pointless psychedelic background, added as always in a lame attempt to hide the shame of a big dumb skull. When will these bands learn, though, that there is no shame in a BDS! Wear it like a badge of honor, the visible proof that you don’t care if anyone knows how uncreative you are. You can pretend all you want that you have better ideas, but you’re fooling no one, and now you can’t even claim to be operating ironically. Say it loud, “I’m a hack and I’m proud!”

The music:
It’s sort of astounding, the number of bands spawned by Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity. Of course, it’s a staggeringly original album, but it was also so singularly odd and musically daunting that when it came out, I doubt anyone would have guessed it would birth an entire cottage industry of wannabes. In an alternate universe, it would be like hundreds of bands blatantly rehashing Control and Resistance in 1991. Anyway, of the legion of DEP knockoffs, Psyopus are one of the better ones, but as with Meshuggah clones, no one ever really comes too close to capturing the magic of the original. Psyopus are on the branch of winking-ironist-DEP-lovers, with a high degree of silliness in their music (and probably lyrics, but I can’t be bothered to find out.) On Odd Senses this manifests in lots of goofy samples and the comic overuse of a whammy pedal. All the blasting and screaming gets old really fast, though, and while the patient scrutiny/endurance of Calculating Inifinity bears the sort of hard-won intellectual rewards you can also expect from, say, Obscura, Psyopus, like all their ilk, offer only the surface details, with none of the hidden depth. You’ll have to work just as hard to make it through their albums in a single sitting, but you’ll find no catharsis at the end. Just a minor headache and the resolve to not do this again any time soon.
— Friar Johnsen

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CHRISTBAIT, Truckin’ (1994, Death Valley)

The skull:
It’s like The Exploited’s skully dude, except his mohawk is a spine. Or a bony Wendy O (there’s probably another joke to be had there, but I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination). Usually we at Skull HQ prefer our skulls head-on (as it were), but this from-the-side skull is so proudly big and dumb that we’re happy to welcome him to the Skullection.

The music:
Based on this single song from a split with Dirt Clod Fight (whom I will not review), Christbait seem to have started as an industrial-inspired crust metal band, but they gradually took on some “southern” elements. They don’t seem to have gone full Eyehategod, but of course, the less New Orleans in your sound, the better. The industrial bit, at least, is of course not surprising, since they almost certainly took their name from Godflesh. The drums are live, which is a nice surprise (I expected programmed beats), and the playing is solid, sometimes even inventive. Think early Pitchshifter mixed with late 80s Amebix and a hint of southern-fried stoner bullshit (mainly in the form of some bluesy fills) and you’re in the right neighborhood. The singing is not great, mainly just yelling, but that’s typical for the crustier genres, and I can live with it, because the song is more or less okay. I might go back and check out their earlier stuff, because minus the swampy shit, this is pretty good.
— Friar Johnsen

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SAVAGE, Holy Wars (1995, Neat)

The skull:
See, these guys did it right. They decided they wanted a big dumb skull cover, so they hired a great artist to paint something awesome. The artist asked, “So, you want some kinda background? Like, maybe I could paint some teepees or Monument Valley or something…” and Savage said, “No, no. Just the skull, with the headdress, on black. That would look best, mate!” And they were so right! This has to be one of the finest skulls in the entire Skullection.

The music:
Savage’s first album, Loose ‘N’ Lethal is a minor NWOBHM classic, a fuzzy, proto-thrash romp that was evidently a formative influence on Metallica. Savage released one more album in the 80s before vanishing, only to reappear for the first wave of new wave nostaligia in the mid 90s. I used to see this album week after week in my favorite metal shop back then, and I always SO wanted to buy it, even listening to it on the store’s CD player many times in a vain attempt to learn to like it, but Holy Wars never won me over. It has the bluesy swing of classic NWOBHM (which is also to say, it doesn’t really sound like old Savage) but it comes with the glossy sheen of a band that hasn’t realized that hair metal isn’t so popular anymore. Nowadays, my standards lowered by maturity or senescence, I find this fairly enjoyable, if still totally inessential. If I saw this for sale, I’d totally buy it, though, then listen to it once and shelve it forever.
— Friar Johnsen

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FANTASMAGORIA, Inconceivable Future (1991, demo)

The skull:
Ah, the radiation symbol. Time was, you could expect at least one of these on damned near every metal release. Cold war nuclear paranoia was good for our music, to be sure! Fantasmagoria didn’t do much with it, though, and this demo cover looks like the result of a bad compromise between one guy who just wanted a skull, and another who just wanted the symbol. “How about we put them both on the cover?” the bassist suggested, playing the peacemaker as always, and while no one really liked the idea, they were at least satisfied that no one else was entirely happy, either. And really, when you put the two together, you get an entirely conceivable future. “Someday, we’re all gonna be skulls. Because of radiation.”

The music:
Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find even a single song from this demo on the internet. Usually these old death metal curios are easy enough to come by. This band is listed by Daniel Ekeroth in his Swedish Death Metal encyclopedia, where he also notes that most of the Fantasmagoria members also played in Morgana Lefay. He says their early work (meaning, this demo) is “deadly” but goes on to say that they ended up as Pantera clones before breaking up. Sounds about right for BDS!
— Friar Johnsen

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VILLAINS/FINGERNAILS, Getting Crazy (2008, Nuclear War Now! Productions)

The skull:
It looks like this skull just stepped off the streets of Brooklyn, he’s so hip, with his garish colors and massive aviators. You can easily imagine Pitchfork readers identifying with him, maybe buying him a PBR. That he’s holding vinyl only seals the deal. That said, for a cover that was probably created in a matter of minutes, it’s pretty striking and, at least by BDS standards, fairly original, if only for its palette.

The music:
I love this kind of split, where each band covers the other. At least, I love it in concept. I don’t know if I’ve heard a good one yet. I don’t know anything about Fingernails, but I’ve seen Villains before, and they’re a pretty gonzo punk/metal kind of thing. They’re the sort of band that makes you wonder if you’re not, yourself, sufficiently intense. Their version of Fingernails’ “Crazy for Blowjobs” is fine, and funny, but also kind of pointless, in the way an awful lot of punk is, 35 years past its creative expiration date. The Fingernails side is even less good, although it’s hard to say if this is their fault, or Villains’ fault for writing a lesser tune. It sounds like they recorded it in their rehearsal space, too. Anyway, this is an ephemeral, for-fans-only release, lasting under 7 minutes total, and while I’ll surely forget the music (actually, I already have), at least the skull is seared into my mind.
— Friar Johnsen