Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

SKULL191

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SUBMISSION, Failure to Perfection (2010, Listenable)

The skull:
Brown and mustard. Not off to a good start. The rayed background is lame, too. The skull, which is shamefully obscured by a very boring logo, is flanked by a couple guns, and then some dog skulls or something? And then there’s a big screw. This is about as random as it gets, but it’s also a pretty good representation of the title, which itself fails to even form a syntactical sentence fragment. What we have here is a total commitment to half-assing it.

The music:
Groovy melodic death metal, kind of like recent Dark Tranquillity, with fairly awful growls and a smattering of reasonably good clean vocals. Submission aren’t doing anything new, but they work this style admirably well, with some really cool guitar riffs to keep things moving. The drums, while proficiently played, offer no surprises, and there are too many core-style breakdowns for my liking, but overall, Submission are alright. I doubt I’ll go out and buy their disc, but at least listening to it for this review wasn’t painful. Anymore, that’s about as good as it gets here at Skull HQ.
— Friar Johnsen

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NOX, Blood, Bones and Ritual Death (2010, Listenable)

The skull:
You start with a skull and crossbones, and you think, “This is cool, but it kinda looks like we play pirate metal.” So, okay, add a ritual circle or something. It’s not a pentagram, but it at least sort of suggests magick or some Crowley shit. Maybe add some esoteric symbols, like that thing on all those King Diamond albums. Looks good! But then, you start thinking, “This is pretty plain, just a skull and a circle. Maybe some clouds or something to fill in the background?” Except now your cover is mostly white and grey. That shit ain’t evil. Maybe if the whole thing was red? Bingo! Now that’s a fucking cover you can take to the bank!

The music:
When this EP started playing, I was initially a little excited by the slinky weird riff that opens the disc. But then Nox repeated that single riff for a minute and a half, and called that a track. So, that’s how it’s going to be, Nox? After that momentary illusion of interest, the EP settles into competent Morbid Angel/Nile worship, with hints of black metal thrown in for good measure. Some of the guitar work is genuinely interesting, including the generally excellent leads, and across the board the playing is solid, but an over-reliance on blast beats and the pedestrian growling drag the whole thing down. I think if Nox spent a little more time trying to write the best songs possible, worrying less about sounding and looking evil, they might come up with some properly great work. That said, the band is on hold while the guitarist pursues another project, so there’s no guessing if this is the last we’ll hear from Nox.
— Friar Johnsen

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EARTHRIDE, Something Wicked (2010, Earth Brain)

The skull:
Surrounded by flowers, bugs, and branches, a ghostly skull with enormous eyes blends into the grass. Maybe the skull is the grass. Woah. Think about it, man. I mean, like, really think about it. You know?

The music:
Fuzzed-out bellbottom doom, like Obsessed meets Electric Wizard, but worse. The singing is terrible, and the guitar tone approaches “all-time-worst.” You can practically hear the mustaches, too. Every now and then they land on a chord progression with some genuine mystery, but the execution and sound are so rotten that those few fleeting moments of inspiration are squandered in a haze of Sunn amplification and poorly doubled vocals. If I never hear another album like this, it’ll be too soon, but I bet it’ll happen in less than two weeks anyway.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL185

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D.S.M., D.S.M. (2013, self-released)

The skull:
I’m not sure what’s going on here. The skull’s skin is peeling away, maybe? And some tentacles are involved? Or maybe it’s some kind of cape or cowl with its own little skull motif? It’s all very confusing, but the overall effect is not unpleasing: the batshit weirdness works in this cover’s favor. Supposedly D.S.M. stands for Double Size Metal, but I think that probably DSM is just how you write BDS in Cyrillic.

The music:
There are many musical ideas presented here, but none of them good. There’s some almost nu-sounding low groove, traces of Darkseed-style goth metal, and even some decidedly Nirvanaesque whining in the first song, “The Way Home”. This three song demo run the gamut of all the low-talent metal styles that no one really wanted to hear in 2000, and this is a brand new release. “Balls of Steel” even features the gratuitous abuse of a whammy pedal. Heavy metal in Putin’s Russia is a grim thing.
— Friar Johnsen

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THRALL, Away from the Haunts of Man (2010, Total Holocaust)

The skull:
As an entry in the increasingly crowded “skull full of snakes” subgenre of Big Dumb Skulls, this Thrall cover is one of the finer specimens, although I really do think these bands and artists have a funny idea of skull physiognomy. I guess they think that the eye sockets open into the interior of the skull with no diminution of diameter, but in fact it’s a rather small hole in the back of the sockets. Just big enough for the optic nerve, actually. Not many long snakes would be able to squeeze through a tiny opening like that. But, this Thrall skull is fairly busted-up, and the snake(s) fairly skinny, so I suppose we could generously assume there are some fissures in the backs of the sockets as well, although anything that would cause that kind of cracking is probably just going to break the skull into pieces. Also, I find it unlikely that any snake, just in the course of day-to-day wriggling, would ever literally tie itself into a knot (see the lower right). What I’m saying is, I find some elements of this heavy metal album cover to be far-fetched.

The music:
One man black metal from Australia. At least it’s not from France, I guess. I’m reminded a little of American bands like Weakling and Woe, but as I’ve said many times before, my black metal knowledge is incomplete. I’ve heard worse, and I’ve heard better than Thrall. I will say that the vocals, or at least the way they’re recorded and mixed, are especially annoying here. I think it’s possible that Tom Void (the aforementioned one man) sang through a cardboard tube into his webcam mic or something. Kvlt.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL181

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ANTHARES, No Limite Da Força (1987, Devil Discos)

The skull:
An impressively mean looking, fanged skull with… tailpipes? Or something? He’s lording his magesterial size over a bunch of lowly skeletons, whose completeness, ironically, makes them the lesser bony creatures. Lightning sparks off the tips of a stony logo, but the big skull is unfazed. He knows he’s non-conductive.

The music:
Brazilian speed metal trying very hard to sound German. With the usual mid 80s Brazilian caveats that this is underproduced, a bit sloppy, and totally derivative, it’s not too bad, if Living Death and Exumer are your thing. Unlike a lot of bands from this time and place, Anthares don’t take themselves too seriously, and there’s a sense of humor evident here, even if I can’t understand a word of the Portugese lyrics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the band is still around (after a ten year break starting in the mid 90s) and still gigging, although they haven’t released anything in close to a decade. By singing in their native language, they’ll probably never catch on outside of Brazil, but eager students of mid 80s thrash could do worse than to save Anthares in their back pocket for an occasion to look really knowledgeable to their impressionable peers.
— Friar Johnsen

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PYLON, Days of Sorrow (2006, Quam Libet)

The skull:
I’m assuming that the hapless designer who put this cover together thought that just converting everything to grayscale would make it look like this randomly pasted skull would appear to be an integral piece of the rococo architectural detail that serves as the background, but nope, it didn’t work out like he’d planned. To boot, the skull is considerably smaller than it could/should have been. A shoddy effort all around.

The music:
Yet another brainless, talentless Sabbath knockoff, fronted by a completely worthless singer. Musically, I like that they sometimes follow their idols down the softer, psychedelic paths that most fuzzed-out Sabs imitators forgo, but man, it’s really hard to endure this shit when the vocals come in (although the heavy German accent is at least a little funny). Days of Sorrow is just three songs on a split with some other no doubt awful band called Painwork, but until they come up with a Big Dumb Skull of their own, I’m not going near them.
— Friar Johnsen

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LOS PIRATES, Heavy Piracy (2009, self-released)

The skull:
A pretty standard-issue skull and crossbones, and certainly very on-the-nose for a pirate metal band. The rope is a weird, pointless, and ugly addition, so at least there’s that. Would it have been so hard to at least try to make it look like the image existed on the faux-parchment beneath it? Otherwise, why even have a backdrop like that? But, half-measures are the mark of a good BDS, I suppose. Or if not a good one, at least a typical one.

The music:
Assuming the worst, as is my general police regarding pirate metal, I was pleasantly surprised by Los Pirates. I’m reminded of mid 90s Rage: highly melodic but not cloying power metal, with shockingly great vocals. Really, Andy Brevi is better than 99.99% of all power metal vocalists out there now, and not only does he have a pleasing voice, his melodies are strong and catchy. Some of the songs, for sure, lay on the yo-ho-ho a little thick, but it’s a little strange to hear a pirate metal band taking their music and work seriously, which leads me to wonder why on earth they chose to shackle themselves to such a ridiculous concept? Why would anyone willingly invite comparisons to the execrable Alestorm? A new name and a new theme would benefit Los Pirates immensely, but in the meantime, I will be buying this forthwith (or at least trying.)
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL175

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BIGRIG, 10-4 Good Buddy (2009, demo)

The skull:
This one pretty much speaks for itself, no? What could I possibly add that would make this funnier? Nothing!

The music:
BigRig is a side project from Admiral Nobeard and Commodore RedRum of the second best pirate metal band of all time, Swashbuckle. As you might expect, BigRig play trucker metal, even if no one else does. The sound is basically goofy deathrock, like midperiod Entombed but better and funny on purpose. They’re a joke band, yeah, but BigRig (like Swashbuckle) are damned good at what they do, and they play this ridiculous shit like they mean it. The unexpected melody in “The Long Haul” almost approaches earnestness, even. I’m sure these guys know it’s a galactic waste of time to put any effort into a throw-away novelty band like BigRig, but they just can’t help doing it right. You have to respect that.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL173

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RITUAL SPIRIT, Ritual Spirit (2001, Shark)

The skull:
Lazy, ugly, and brown even by the depraved standards of Big Dumb Skulls, this is one of the saddest covers I’ve ever seen. What band could care so little about their art, what label be so unconcerned with success, to have settled on this image? It’s like a suicide note, this cover, anhedonia expressed through Photoshop. “We feel nothing. The world is without meaning. No one knows anyone, and we all die alone. Signed, Ritual Spirit.”

The music:
Unbelievably, indeed depressingly, I was not able to find even a single song by this band online. Shark Records released a lot of crap to be sure, but they were a big enough label that you’d think someone would have bought, liked, and memorialized it to YouTube, especially since the band was founded by some ex-member of Tyran Pace (known best as Ralf Scheeper’s first band). Almost every big dumb skull has left some musical mark on the internet, down to the most obscure and ephemeral artifacts of three decades past. Ritual Spirit, though, exists only as a collective dream, a half-remembered hallucination of middling power metal. Oblivion awaits us all, and one day the last person to have heard even Metallica will pass from this earth.
— Friar Johnsen