Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

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1349, Demonoir (2010, Indie Recordings)

The skull:
Credit where credit is due: this is a pretty badass skull. Deep watercolors and dark shadows evoke a genuinely hellish vision, here. The jagged teeth of the gaping, inarticulate maw are especially disturbing: not screaming or grimacing this skull, but thoughtless, agape and hungry. The brilliant but limited palette perfectly captures the monochromatic starkness that is the ideal in black metal, but to greater effect than all but the best of the black and white pretenders. This is some seriously evil shit.

The music:
I’ve always enjoyed 1349’s semi-sophisticated take on black metal. Of course, Frost is one of, if not the best drummer in black metal, but unlike the recent stripped-down stupidity of his main band, 1349 brings the speed and angular weirdness that Satyricon so artfully deployed on their classic mid 90s releases, the godlike Nemesis Divina in particular. 1349 are still too blazingly fast, all the time, for my tastes, but there’s no other band working at these tempos that can even begin to hold my interest. The slower sections work best for me, and songs like “Pandemonium War Bells” that really mix up the speeds are the highlights of the album. The clean production goes a long way toward keeping 1349 listenable: even through the blasting, the riffing is articulate and audible. The vocals are pretty standard issue, but if you’re listening to black metal for the vocals, well, you have some weird priorities.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL134

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RETRO GRAVE Again (2008, Upland)

The skull:
A quickie still life, probably done digitally but at least pretending to be an oil sketch or something, this is actually pretty classy as big dumb skulls go, but every bit as unambitious as the rest. Considering how badly this band wants to be 40 years older than they are, it’s kind of funny how little effort they put into the typography and design of this cover. The illustration might have passed retro muster, but nothing else does.

The music:
Psychedelic stoner metal, as you could probably have guessed. Total 70s style throwback music. Like Witchcraft or more recent acts like Blood Ceremony and Kadaver, Retro Grave don’t make even the slightest effort at originality, content to emulate their inspirations in every way: musically, sonically, aesthetically. Retro Grave is the work of one Jeff Olson, whose greatest claim to fame is as a footnote in Trouble’s history. Weirdly, this album was actually recorded and released twice, which makes the title sadly literal. Poor Friar Wagner also had to listen to this crap, but his review was swallowed by the cruel gods of the database, and I didn’t have the heart to make him review this stinker a second time.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL133

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THE AWAKENING, Countdown to Misanthropy (2005, Twilight Vertrieb)

The skull:
A cartoony skull (making no allowances for dentition) in a busted-up cog, floating over a… puzzle of the badlands? In a loading zone? Who can say what’s supposed to be going on here, or how this cover could possible relate to the poorly conceived title. Are we to imagine the skull thinking, “All you humans out there? You’d better hold on to your asses because I’m gonna start hatin’ the shit out of ’em in a few minutes…” Adding to the confusion is the weirdly double-set title, no doubt the result of the band being unable to choose between the gritty modern font and the evil olde-tyme font. See also the logo and that symbol hiding behind the nondescript lettering: that’s a leftover of the A and G from their old logo, when The Awakening played pagan metal. These guys really just can’t make up their minds.

The music:
I was certain, looking at this cover, that the music it adorned would be Pantera/Machine Head style groove metal, but surprisingly, that’s not at all what The Awakening are about (now, at least. Maybe one of their other albums, though!) This is modern death metal, mid paced to quick, but rarely blasty. Sure, there are some thrash influences, but only as ornamentation. What you mostly get is Malevolent Creation / Monstrosity style DM, with a touch of the weirdness that informs a lot of German death metal, even the rotten stuff. This is not my preferred form of death metal, but some of this album really isn’t bad. I know I shouldn’t be saying nice things about a song called “Payment in Skin,” but it’s slithering riffs and barely-in-control drumming more or less work. Sure, the vocals are generic and the lyrics are dumb, but this can be said about even a lot of good death metal. That said, it appears that The Awakening broke up half a decade ago. Countdown averted, misanthropy delayed.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL131

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VOMITOR, Bleeding the Priest (2002, Metal Blood Music)

The skull:
Although it’s probably supposed to look like it was photocopied (or Xeroxed, as we’d have said in 1986) a dozen times to remove any nuance of shading, this is surely just some skull scanned from a book (or another demo!), with the colors reduced to two in Photoshop. As with all things, it’s way easier to be cult in this day and age than it used to be.

The music:
Possessed meets Bathory. Sloppy as shit, derivative as fuck, pointless as hell. I’m sure you can already hear it in your head: buzzy guitars, tinny drums, reverberated vocals. There isn’t a single original idea or riff on this entire album, although first half of “Reaper’s Carrion” is pretty cool, before it turns into some terrible Obsessed By Cruelty outtake. This is so stupidly oldschool that this 2002 release was reissued on cassette in 2013. I look forward to the flexi box set packed in a Trapper Keeper that’s set to be released in 2016. Based on all the surface details, I assumed Vomitor were Brazilian, but the internet assures me they’re Australian, which really just makes them the poor man’s Slaughter Lord, nearly 20 years late. A dubious distinction, that.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL129

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GOATWHORE, Carving Out the Eyes of God (2009, Metal Blade)

The skull:
A bleak black and white skull with some occult symbol scrawled in the forehead, probably from the corny Simon Necronomicon published in the early 80s (see also: Morbid Angel). The skull is flanked by two scythes, which I can’t imagine are the ideal tools for eye-carving, but underneath the skull are two of those ridiculous “combat knives” you’re likely to find at that cutlery store in the mall that also sells Klingon weaponry. I guess you could those to carve out the eyes of God, even if a straight blade is almost certainly a better choice. The skull obviously has no eyes, so maybe it’s supposed to be God’s skull, but if it is, eye carving is probably the least of this skully God’s problems. He’s got no skin, and Cthulhu is on his case!

The music:
I’ve never been able to get into Goatwhore, but since most of my time not enjoying them is spent actually seeing them live (they open for a lot of bands I like), I usually forget that their albums are really not so bad. They’re just not my thing. Goatwhore are basically a stew of Slayer, Deicide, and Celtic Frost: mid-to-fast paced thrashy death metal with a swaggering groove. Their earlier albums feature a pretty strong black metal influence, but that’s less evident on this, their third full length. But from album to album, and then song to song, there’s very little variation and almost no genuine creativity, and the entire enterprise feels too calculatedly engineered to interest angry adolescents in nail-studded bracers. Slayer’s been working that beat for years, and even they can’t turn that mission into good music, so what chance does a band from New Orleans have?
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL127

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CANNAE, Troubleshooting Death (2000, East Coast Empire)

The skull:
Staring at a screengrab of this weirdly glowing skull, filthy with gravegrime, a weary Hyderabadi tech support agent asks, “Have you tried rebooting it? Is the skull plugged in?” He’s never quite understood the job of troubleshooting death, nor is he even comfortable asking who is ultimately paying him, but the wages are good. “Maybe these thorns are the issue. Were they there when the problems started?” He’s going off script, which rarely makes anyone happy, but he doesn’t know what else to say. “That stuff in the background is probably blood,” he muses. “Maybe when the flesh was removed…” he begins, when the caller curses at him and hangs up. He doesn’t care. He’s paid by the call, and the queue is deep.

The music:
Typical deathcore crap, a mix of the worst Obituary riffs and desultory breakdown chugs. There’s not much to say about this kind of music, so I’ll take this opportunity to appreciate the editorial decision of Metal Archives (the Council’s second favorite internet destination) to deny this entire style a place in its hallowed halls. For as much as I hate this stuff, I’d say it’s undeniably metal, and while all deathcore is completely awful, the same can be said of pornogrind, which is heartily welcomed in the Archives. One imagines that the embargo is not based on the music, but on the haircuts, or maybe the logos. Who knows, but it’s just another reason Metal Archives rules, even if it sometimes makes our jobs here at Skull HQ a little harder.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL125

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DEATHALIZER, It Dwells Within (2009, self released)

The skull:
This skull is pissed! Pissed about holistic healing or something, I guess, because he’s chomping the shit out of those crystals. He don’t give a fuck about his chakra. Lord knows what those things above his head are. Really badly knicked scythes? Bullwhips with terribly unergonomic grips? Only the skull knows, and I’m not going to be the one to ask him. I don’t want to be deathalized!

The music:
With all the new retro thrash bands out there, it’s easy to forget that even throughout the 00s, thrash never died entirely. Sweden more or less carried the torch all those years, but there were some American bands, too, who loved that old bay area shit even when everyone else was getting moist over post-post-post-whatever. The main creative difference between those wayward thrash acts of the aughts and the snotty atavists of today’s new scene is that the thrash bands in the age of George W Bush acknowledged and even celebrated the influence of Pantera. And so we come to New York’s Deathalizer, whose sole release is this full length mash-up of late 80s Metallica and Pantera, with a dash of pre-cornrow Machine Head. You’d expect something like this to suck horribly, but surprisingly, it does not. This isn’t life-affirmingly excellent stuff, but it’s riffy and catchy, with reasonably good Hetfieldian vocals and even some interesting harmonized cleans. I wish the guitars harmonized a little more often, or mixed up textures within riffs, but this is a pretty common shortcoming of modern thrash acts. Considering that this is the band’s debut recording, and the band is still together, I’d say there’s a good chance that their next album will start to approach actual excellence, so keep an eye out for these guys.
— Friar Johnsen

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CANNIBAL CORPSE, The Wretched Spawn (2004, Metal Blade)

The skull:
This is just the censored version of the cover, which crops out a trio of zombie doctors presiding over a fairly implausible double caesarian/natural delivery. The skull in question is just a detail of the decor in their abominable operating theater, or something. It kind of looks like bone, but it would make more sense if it was just a carved detail in a larger wooden piece. The skull is splattered with blood, despite being what looks to be a fair distance from the table, so I guess you know that a lot of really nasty shit goes down here. Or whatever. Man, it’s hurting my head trying to impose narrative on a Cannibal Corpse album cover.

The music:
I’ve hated Cannibal Corpse for a long time. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t hated any metal band so vehemently for so long. I bought their first album, on cassette, shortly after I had discovered Carcass. I went back to the same shop and said, “Give me something like Symphonies of Sickness!” and that asshole sold me Eaten Back to Life. Now, I will grant that Cannibal Corpse have improved over the years, and some of their post-Chris Barnes albums almost sort of approach listenable, but in truth, even the best of them are fairly bad. It’s the same fucking shit, over and over, with the same inane lyrics belted out with the same charmless growl, and some of the most boring death metal drumming ever. I do understand the appeal of this band to angry, awkward teenagers who want to piss off their parents (it is eternally offensive after all), but I can’t for the life of me understand how an adult (who isn’t a sociopath) could find anything to like in Cannibal Corpse. Nostalgia for their awkward and angry adolescence? Who knows. Some day, arthritis of the neck will permanently disable Alex Webster and Corpsegrinder, and when that happens, here’s hoping the former retires to a quiet senescence making Blotted Science albums with Ron Jarzombek, and the latter leaves the scene forever to get fat in front of his monitors, playing the 17th iteration of World of Warcraft.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL121

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EDEN’S CURSE, Condemned to Burn (2009 Metal Mayhem)

The skull:
For a cover stitched together from a bunch of stock art, this is at least nicely done. Raven, skull, fire, banner, some brickwork in the back. The album is called Condemned to Burn after all, so the flames make sense, and the raven is a traditional omen of death, and maybe that scroll thing is supposed to evoke a written sentence or something. I can’t explain the bricks, but a skull’s gotta float above something I suppose.

The music:
Condemned to Burn appears to be a quickie odds-and-sods compilation thrown together to sell on tour, so there’s no real cohesion here, just your ordinary mix of bonus tracks, acoustic versions, demos, and live cuts. Eden’s Curse are heavy AOR like recent PC69 or pretty much any “metal” band on Frontiers. When they get heavy, it’s all crunch and no riff, and when they go light, it sounds like they’re looking for a radio hit in 1987, but the songs are generally catchy enough. Groaningly, the singer’s stage name is Michael Eden, which somehow makes everything sound worse. He’s got a nice set of pipes, and if he comes off a little girly sometimes, he’s at least always in tune and reasonably emotive. Highlights are the opener, “Prisoner of the Past” and “Eyes of the World,” while the hairy stomp of “Stronger than the Flame” is probably my least favorite tune here. In fact, none of the demo tunes are especially great, and since I assume they’re demos for something, that doesn’t bode especially well for their proper full length albums. That said, “Prisoner of the Past” was a bonus track, so unless they’re the sort of band who leaves their best stuff for their secondary markets (a weird and strangely common phenomenon), they must have some fairly good songs in their catalog somewhere. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to finding out, but it’s nice to make it through a review with some optimism intact.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL118

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W.A.S.P., Best of the Best (2000, Snapper)

The skull:
While I guess it took a little while to clip together the background collage of old W.A.S.P. albums and royalty-free saw blades, the final product here is still a triumph of laziness and grim boredom. The enormous skull seems to have no greater raison d’être than to provide a whitish background so the logo stands out better, but if nothing else, it would be difficult to fit more skull on this cover. Of course, plopping a translucent skull over a red background means most of your cover will be pink, but hey, we don’t judge here.

The music:
While W.A.S.P. has released about three dozen greatest hits compilations, the definitive, nay quintessential W.A.S.P. best-of is their self-titled debut, which contains about 85% of all the good songs they ever recorded, a fact obviously not lost on the hard working folks at Snapper Records, who saw fit to dedicate a full third of the tracklist on Best of the Best to songs from that album or the band’s debut single. Bear in mind that W.A.S.P. had released eight albums by the time this compilation was issued, two of which are entirely unrepresented here. But while you won’t be hearing any songs from Still Not Black Enough or Kill Fuck Die on Best of the Best, you’ll get two tracks from Helldorado, the band’s worst album (as of 2000), including the flabbergasting “Dirty Balls.” And really, if “9.5.-N.A.S.T.Y.” is to be counted among the best of the best, I shudder to imagine what even the worst of the best would be. Die-hard W.A.S.P. fans will of course want this for the two exclusive songs, including the all-time second best heavy metal cover of Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” The best never sounded so bad.
— Friar Johnsen