Author Archives: Friar Johnsen

SKULL57

Posted on by
Reply

ARMAGEDDON, The Money Mask (1989, Talkingtown)

The skull:
You have to admire the literality of this cover: the money mask is a decoupage skull made of five dollar bills. Is that supposed to make a statement about Lincoln or something? After all, Armageddon were from Civil War battleground town Falls Church, VA, and one of their guitarists was named Robby Lee. Hmm. Assuming there’s no confederate meaning intended by the cover, if this had been a real arts-and-crafts project (which might have made it the greatest big dumb skull of all time), the decision to use fivers would have made some economic sense, but if you’re commissioning a painting of a money mask, why not go all in? I have it on good authority that it’s all about the Benjamins, baby Jesus.

The music:
Is there a more effective and immediate descriptor to temper expectations than the words, “Christian metal”? Even when it’s good, it’s rarely great, and the good stuff isn’t exactly plentiful. Not unlike contemporaries Saint, Armageddon play a glossy take on mid 80s’ Accept and Priest: generally midpaced and ham-fisted to an Xtreme (the “X” is for Christ). Mike Vance’s melodic voice appealingly recalls Jon Oliva, but his low-end, Dirkschneiderian croak is tough to bear. The playing, songwriting, and production are all eminently professional, but there’s hardly a spark of passion (no pun intended) in this music. The faster numbers work best for me, and “We’re Outa Here” is the album-closing highlight, but all in all, The Money Mask sounds calculated to appeal to “the kids” who weren’t otherwise open to The Good News. I doubt that’s exactly how it happened, but that’s the vibe anyway. As an amusing aside, Joe Hasselvander, of Pentagram and Raven, played in Armageddon for a while, although I’m not sure if he’s on this album. You’ve got to love a guy working both sides of the aisle like that. No matter where he ends up when he dies, he’ll have an album on hand to put him in good graces with the new boss.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL55

Posted on by
2

FLAMING SKULL, Brutal Murder (2006, demo)

The skull:
A flaming skull! The name says it all, and there’s really nothing NOT to like about this cover. Despite some serious-looking fissures in his dome, and some inexplicable dental issues (are his teeth on fire?), this skull looks quite happy, as if all he ever wanted to do was to flame. There are even cute little fires burning in his eye sockets. When this guy flames, he flames all out. It’s the conflagration sensation that’s sweeping the nation. I also appreciate that while the skull itself is fairly well rendered, the flames look like they were painted by a young child who has perhaps never seen fire firsthand. Lastly, the amateurishness of the logo contrasts nicely with the generic blandness of the title font. This BDS is truly a work of art.

The music:
Death metal from Bogata that parties like it’s 1986. Scream Bloody Gore and early Autopsy are the touchstones here: sloppy, inarticulate, and totally forgettable. There’s a certain charm to the guilelessness of early death metal that’s basically impossible to recapture. Those bands were messy and artless because they were just dumb teenagers who didn’t know any better. I don’t understand why anyone would want to try to recreate that, after 20 years of further innovation and refinement. You can suck like Mantas, but you’ll never be Mantas.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL53

Posted on by
2

DETENTE, History I (2008, Cognitive)

The skull:
A big red skull (but not the Red Skull), hastily pasted onto a black background with some red ravens, or something. A faint glow-line surrounds the skull which is not so much an aesthetic effect as an artifact of poor matting in Photoshop, and this glow is thematically reinforced by the zen-like ugliness of the generic, free font in which the text was set. The (jawless) skull itself was probably originally done in charcoal, and as big dumb skulls go, it’s a fine example (central and unadorned) but it probably could have been bigger. Compilations like this are a perennial occasion for BDSery, but even by the low standards of the cash-in demo compilation, this cover stands out for its laziness and ineptitude.

The music:
History I collects Detente’s first demo, and several demos by Catalepsy, the band formed by the three guys fired at once by singer Dawn Crosby. Since there are six Catalepsy tunes to only four by Detente, it would have made more sense to call this a Catalepsy release, but of course no one knows who they were, while Detente are still a warmly remembered second-tier thrash band from the golden years. All four Detente tracks appeared on the band’s classic Recognize No Authority album, and the sound quality here is actually quite good for a demo rescued from the clutches of 1985. The Catalepsy tracks are also fairly well preserved, and they do faithfully continue in the tradition of the Detente album. The main appeal of this band was always the barbed-wire vocals of Crosby, so it’s actually fairly surprising how similar in sound and effectiveness her Catalepsian counterpart, Veronica Ross, is on her tracks. Both women bring an unchained, but still vaguely melodic charisma to the well written but hardly original thrash that was the stock and trade of Detente. Catalepsy included drummer Dave McClain, later of S.A. Slayer, Sacred Reich, and Machine Head, and both Detente and Catalepsy were anchored by guitarist Ross Robinson, who went on to fame and fortune as a producer, bestowing on the world such immortal classics as Korn’s self-titled debut and Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill, Yall$. So, it’s fair to say that it wasn’t Robinson who threw this disc together, as he sure as shit doesn’t need the money.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL51

Posted on by
3

SIX FEET UNDER, Graveyard Classics (2000, Metal Blade)

The skull:
Two grubby hands hold a skull freshly plucked (it is presumed) from the grave. I do appreciate that the hands are placed in such a posture as to maximize the viewable area of the skull, even though no one would ever pick up a spheroid in that fashion. But perhaps the hands belong to a blind novice bowler groping to find the finger holes. His asshole friends titter in the background as he thinks, “This bowling alley smells awfully peaty, and I think this ball is broken.” Big, dumb, and skullacious, this cover is easily the greatest artistic success of this band’s entire career.

The music:
Six Feet Under were founded at the start on a stupefying premise: “What if you assembled the worst members of Death, Obituary, and Cannibal Corpse to form an all new band?” While there have always (and inexplicably) been Chris Barnes partisans, I’m pretty sure no one ever said or thought the following: “Cause of Death would be SO much better if Alan West was on it,” and “I like Human, but I really miss Terry Butler.” This is basically the worst imaginable band, the literal antipode to excellence, and from day one, they made it their mission to deliver on that promise of musical misery. Still, no hapless listener could have prepared himself for the galactic enormity of Graveyard Classics, an unfathomable covers compilation insulting the hard rock legends who theoretically (if not audibly) influenced this shittiest of bands. It’s bad enough to hear SFU mangle the likes of “Hell’s Bells” or “Purple Haze,” but Savatage? Angel Witch? The Hague has adjudicated atrocities of lesser magnitude. Barnes’s growl, the worst in the history of death metal, is patently without charm or nuance, and he adds absolutely nothing in the way of rhythm or menace to make up for the vocal melodies he displaces. Unadorned by reverb or delay, his flaccid gurgle is the vile mold atop a weeping, rancid cheese. That so many of these songs are slowed down doesn’t sound like an aesthetic choice so much as a necessary one, adopted when it was realized no one could play “Smoke on the Water” at tempo. For as bad as Six Feet Under’s original albums are, Graveyard Classics is unquestionably worse, but in abject defiance of good taste and sanity, it was evidently popular enough to prompt TWO sequels. To everyone who bought this album I feel compelled to say, “You are the worst person in the world.” I mean it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL49

Posted on by
Reply

APOLION, Death Grows Into Sperm (2009, Bylec Tum)

The skull:
Have I died and gone to Hell? What great deed have I done to deserve so sublimely ridiculous a skull as this? Although the hallmark of the average Big Dumb Skull is a wanton disregard for the theme of the album’s title, in this rare instance, the two coexist in blissful, skullacious harmony. Death grows into sperm. Calvariam cum flagellum. A screaming skullatozoa. Whispy lines framing the skull suggest seminal fluid, and the bluish hue recalls the hazy glow of the ultrasound machine. A tour de force of conceptual unity! It is preferred, of course, that skulls face forward, but here, the orientation is key to the overall composition, and the Council could not be more pleased.

The music:
Apolion is Michele Ricci, who endearingly (and atypically) foregoes a psyeudonym, and Death Grows Into Sperm is surprisingly decent for a one man black metal project. I’m not the foremost expert on the genre, but I hear a mix of Dark Medieval Times and Worship Him, especially in the Vorphalackian vocals and the groovy midpaced sections. Most songs are generally uptempo but not fully blasty, tempered by the occasional clean guitar section, tastefully played. The production is good, perhaps over-clean, and I believe that not only are the drums programmed, but the bass as well, which is amusing. Speaking of midi: I never fully approve of sequenced drums, but they sound extra-wrong in black metal, where the push and pull of a mediocre drummer playing faster than his abilities allow is one of the signature elements of the style. The mechanized precision of the drum machine brings order at the expense of a very necessary chaos. Maybe Apolion would be a little better, or at least more authentic, if Ricci tapped them out in real time on his keyboard. But then again, maybe it’s best that he quit while he was ahead.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL47

Posted on by
2

HYPOCRISY, Into the Abyss (2000, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
A dirty, jawless skull in the crosshairs of some kind of reticle, or possibly trapped in a game of Tempest, either emanating or absorbing some weak-looking lightning bolts, and floating over a background of… some brown junk? Dirty pipes or something? Who knows. A skull this lazy just doesn’t have the energy to explain his environment. He’s like, “Man, what do you want from me? I don’t get a say here. I needed some money quick to take care of some shit, and they’re like, ‘Just go float over there, by the red glow,’ and I’m like, whatever, dudes. When do I get paid?”

The music:
If ever a band deserved such a nondescript cover, it was Hypocrisy in the early 00s. Not that their music was terrible or anything, but the meat-and-potatoes death metal with keyboards thing they were peddling at this time was pretty damned uninspired. They had gotten past the “we’re so fucking evil and brutal” out of their system fairly early, and the style of the slow and odd “Fourth Dimension” (my personal favorite Hypocrisy album) evidently didn’t have any staying power. When they settled into the mid-paced middle of their career, it was clear they didn’t really have any particularly good ideas, so they just went with the death metal trends of the day and played the basketball beat over a dozen interchangeable, trebly, black-metal style riffs played high on the fretboard. That is, when they weren’t striving for some buzzy groove, which mainman Peter Tägtgren’s signature ultra-high-gain production rendered in the least comfortable tones possible. It was never really awful listening to Hypocrisy, but it was rarely any fun.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL45

Posted on by
1

REPUGNANT, Hecatomb (1999, To The Death)

The skull:
Small, but feisty, this little guy looks a bit cracked up and leers dumbly at you with his one eye. While the Council ordinarily disqualifies skulls that are obviously a part of a larger skeleton, the tiny fragment of spine, unencumbered by shoulder blades or any other bony bits, was found to not distract from the centrality of the skull. Considering the emptiness of the cover, it is felt that the skull could have been bigger, but since “hecatomb” originally meant the sacrificial slaughter of 100 cattle, the dumbness of this singular skull compensated for its meager smallness.

The music:
Formed in 1998, Repugnant more or less labored in obscurity, but if they had been formed a decade earlier, they would have been immediately signed to Earache, sounding as they do on this EP like a cross between Nihilist and Terrorizer (in their less blasty moments), with dashes of early Death and Celtic Frost. Considering how well worn this territory was then and continues to be, Repugnant pull it off with striking conviction and integrity. The production is raw, and certainly evocative of the era Hecatomb means to recall, but it’s also not off-puttingly retro or lo-fi. The drumming is lively and competent in a modern sense, without affecting the old-school sound of the beats. Amusingly, singer and guitarist Mary Goore was also in the retro sleaze metal act Crashdïet, which shows that as a heavy metal nostalgia hound, his tastes run the gamut. As long as the style is outdated, he’s into it.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL43

Posted on by
Reply

WE BUTTER THE BREAD WITH BUTTER, We Butter The Bread With Butter (2007, demo)

The skull:
Looking like a blacklight poster for the swoop haircut set, this colorful cover features (most of) a large anatomical-style drawing of a skull framed by some flowery pastel border. There’s a bit of jaw visible at the bottom, but this was ruled a reflection of a single big dumb skull, and not a second, disqualifying skull. Really, this would be a pretty excellent big dumb skull cover, excelling in both bigness and dumbness, it weren’t claimed by some braindead fucking deathcore band.

The music:
Just about the only thing worse than deathcore is rap metal. Stale knockoffs of In Flames riffs combined with mosh breakdowns that would embarrass the worst band signed to Victory Records in 1997, all played by kids who hang out at the mall, deathcore is an assult on all the senses. We Butter The Bread With Butter’s scant claim to fame is that they added garish keyboards and electronics to the mix, vilely presaging the abomination known as Nintendocore (along with crabcore, the most awful of the many minimicrosubgenres of deathcore). About the only thing I can say in We Butter The Bread With Butter’s deathcore defense is that they don’t employ the good cop/bad cop vocals popularized by Killswitch Engage, but the all-death vocals they do employ are Chris Barnes-level shitty. Really, the only thing worse than having to listen to this is the indignity of having to type “We Butter The Bread With Butter” five times.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL41

Posted on by
1

ARCH ENEMY, Doomsday Machine (2005, Century Media)

The skull:
A dusty, aged-looking skull, missing a tooth and looking quite tough, haloed by a biomechanical representation of Arch Enemy’s circle-with-four-protrusions symbol, the whole assemblage floating over the most generic industrial-looking backdrop you can imagine. I interviewed Mike Amott when Stigmata came out, and he vaguely alluded to a secret meaning behind the symbol, a meaning which he vowed to never disclose. I found that fairly annoying, and have never made any further effort to learn if he kept that promise. I always assumed it had something to do with the (then) four members of the band, but of course after Johan Liiva left, the band became a five piece. If there is a meaning to it, it’s almost surely far less clever than Amott imagined, which brings us back to this skull. Is this halo/collar supposed to be the doomsday machine? If so, can it really be considered as such if you need to clamp it on to every person you want to doom? This is not how mad science works. As always with this sort of Photoshop art, the various elements don’t quite look like they inhabit the same space, but the skull itself if pleasingly big and undeniably the focus of the cover.

The music:
I love the first couple Arch Enemy discs to death. They’re exactly the blend of Carcass-style melody and Carnage-style aggression that we all wanted from Mike Ammot, who was mostly just dicking around in Spiritual Beggars at the time. (No slam on Spiritual Beggars, though — as stoner/psych metal goes, they’re about as good as it gets.) But even by the third album, the melody/brutality balance was falling out of whack. When Liiva left and Angela Gossow joined, it felt like the band decided to leverage the appeal of their attractive singer to create the most marketable death metal band possible. It’s not that their albums immediately got bad – they didn’t. But, while Black Earth and Stigmata felt like the heavy albums Ammot really wanted to make, the Gossow albums, pretty much all of them, feel like the heavy albums Ammot is obligated to make. His death metal day job. The confrontational spirit of the earlier albums, a spirit pretty much essential to good death metal, more or less vanished, and the rough edges were mercilessly sanded down. All of the Gossow albums would be better with a melodic singer. They’re no more death metal than, say, Nevermore. In fact, death vocals be damned, on average there’s considerably less aggression on display in these latter-day Arch Enemy albums than in all but the weakest Nevermore discs. So while Doomsday Machine has more than its fair share of killer riffs (the ending of the title track is pretty awesome), and even some very well assembled songs, the vibe is just somehow off. This album just doesn’t rile me up the way Black Earth does, to this day, and Gossow’s over-effected and bland, if serviceable, vocals (say what you will about Liiva, he has an unmistakable voice) utterly fail to sell the evil. The super slick production doesn’t help either. Daniel Erlandsson (always the lesser Erlandsson), can blast in time, sure, but the mix utterly tames these supposedly furious beats. Is it painful to listen to Doomsday Machine? Not at all. Just pointless.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL39

Posted on by
1

HAEMORRHAGE, The Kill Sessions (2007, Emetic)

The skull:
Half a skull (probably cribbed from a textbook or something), set to the far left of a black background, and adorned with a rusty blood splatter on the forehead. One wonders how it was decided that half a skull was better than a whole skull. Did the graphic designer not know how to resize his skull clip art? When he realized the image he had was going to take up the entire cover, he realized he also didn’t know how to get the logo over the skull without blacking out the entire rectangle (since the logo had a black backgound). So, he moved the skull over to make room for the logo and title. Perfecto!

The music:
A live-in-the-studio recording of fan-selected tunes, The Kill Sessions is as inessential as its cover is inept. Given the name and the logo, it should come as no surprise that Haemorrhage are a straight-up Carcass clone, working the Reek and Symphonies beat without any interest in advancing the story. There’s a youthful vitality to those early Carcass records, and a playfulness that goes a long way toward redeeming the occasionally hilarious sloppiness of the proceedings. Haemorrhage, it can be said, play their instruments better than Bill, Jeff, and Ken did on that first album, but they certainly don’t eclipse their heroes’ sophomore-album performances, and if there is any ironic fun hiding in Haemorrhage’s lyrics (I didn’t bother to check), there’s none of the Carcassian cheek in Haemorrhage’s music. There have been some great Carcass clones over the years (Impaled, and to a lesser extent, Exhumed come to mind), but far, far more pointless ones, and while Haemorrhage are hardly the worst of their kind, there’s not much more value in being in the middle of the pointless many.
— Friar Johnsen