SKULL186

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Friar Wagner

CHTON, Chtonian Lifecode (2004, Retribute)

The skull:
An arty sort of thing here, the skull looking down in apparent despair. We can only speculate where the blood is coming from. Crowns of thorns are popular in metal imagery, so maybe he’s looking down to find the crown of thorns that just fell off his head…but then he’d need some flesh for the crown to produce some bleeding and he’s just a damn skull made of nothin’ but bone so…who can really know? This cover has that confusing thing going on where the album title is flown large at top, making it look like the band’s name is Chtonian Lifecode and the album title is Chton, but no, it’s the other way around. Silly buggers.

The music:
You don’t hear music like this out of Norway very often: death metal apparently influenced by Suffocation and Rottrevore, the kind of tractor-pull noise that I admit a certain fondness for. But you better throw a twist into it, otherwise you’ll be in the shadow of the originators. And while Chton offer an extremely heavy sound that harkens to those acts, they also deliver the occasional wash of dissonant guitar chords and various modernisms, like chunkier chords and rhythms, and a slightly slicker production. So they’re not entirely stuck in the world of early ’90s death metal, but they do use that as a base for their particularly dark, heavy and brutal compositions. I admire what they’re doing here — especially the ungodly heavy bottom end and the Autopsy-like grit — and am curious to check out their second album, which was finally released eight years after this debut. If it’s just a little more interesting than this, then they’re not getting the attention they deserve in this current wave of fondness for old-school death metal. As for Chtonian Lifecode, it slipped by without much impact in 2004, but it’s worth checking out if you’re in the mood for death metal with one foot in the present and another in the good old days.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL185

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

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

SKULL184

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Friar Wagner

EGZEKUTHOR, Hateful Subconsciousness (1990, demo)

The skull:
From top to bottom this artwork is fun. Try and figure out the logo and what their name means (a play on “executor”? Eggs + executive + Thor?) then work down. Is the skull separating itself from the logo, or crashing into it? Either way he’s got menace in his eyes and looks ready to kill his paintball competition. But he appears to be cracking, and the three paintball splats seem to have caused some of this grief. And he’s got to avoid the fire that burns below (there are a LOT of skull covers depicting fire burning below a skull). What this has to do with having a hateful subconscious is hard to tell, but that would be difficult to convey in a drawing, so the artist did the best he could.

The music:
With the muddy, blurry, echoey recording job, the awesomely named Egzekuthor manages to lend some atmosphere to their fairly standard compositions. This five song, 25-minute demo achieves something a bit above the norm in its class, although it’s yet another “in one ear, out the other” sort of effort. The music itself isn’t bad — there are enough tempo shifts and performance skill to chew on — it’s just that their enthusiasm is greater than their songwriting ability. Their core approach attempts to take what the Big Three of German Thrash Metal did in the ’80s and inject a bit more complexity without going fully “tech,” but not enough highlights emerge from the noisy din screaming “replay me!” In fact, there isn’t a single moment on this demo that does that. So…marvel at the cover and their crazy name and enjoy it for what it is: a barely consequential blip on the radar of Polish metal history.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL183

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

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

SKULL182

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Friar Wagner

OBSERVANT, Corrodead (2010, demo)

The skull:
This skull comes with accompanying crossbones and is rendered a rust color to suggest corrosion. Look at what Observant is trying to convey here: death + corrosion = corrodead. That’s some kinda genius. As a cover and a concept, ain’t nothing going on here.

The music:
Once again we have a skull cover without much to offer and music that’s equally apathetic. Oh sure, Observant might sound like they mean it, but this is utterly unremarkable melodic death metal with some chunky, downtuned grooving added in. The vocals are lower than the norm in this genre, like Monstrosity/Bolt Thrower pitch. Sometimes they’re scratchier or more grating. They almost attain melody in one small part of “Smoke Screen.” None of it is memorable. The musicians have played in other unimportant bands while the vocalist has been fronting Finntroll since 2006. You kinda understand why they’ve not released anything other than this 2010 demo. The other guys: “Hey, vocalist, you wanna come down to rehearsal and work up some new Observant material?” The vocalist: “Nah, I gotta tour the world again and get paid well in Finntroll. Maybe next year?” And so it goes, year after year after year. Don’t look for any new Observant material anytime soon. — Friar Wagner

SKULL181

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

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

SKULL180

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Friar Wagner

DIMMU BORGIR, Gateways (2010, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
One thing’s for sure: this skull cover matches the music inside…highly-adorned and faked-up with lots of technology. This skull has a couple extra sets of eye sockets above its main ones, and although a lone skull is completely useless as a warrior, it is nonetheless dressed for war here. With a horny (hehe) headpiece, little shield-like things hanging around, and various weird shit scattered around it, it’s probably more ornamental than something actually utile.

The music:
The only Dimmu Borgir song I ever liked was 1997’s “Mourning Palace,” and even that song’s effect wore off after about 5 or 6 listens. Fast forward to 2010 and Dimmu Borgir sounds really, really unappealing. This single, “Gateways,” is more Rammstein than Norwegian black metal in its cold militaristic cadence, and the plastic-y production is terrible: feather-light guitar sound, repetitive triggered double bass, sampled choir vocals, cheesy synth sounds that are WAY too high in the mix. If Leaves’ Eyes covered newer Immortal songs and Abbath sang guest vocals, it might sound like this, but really, “Gateways” is even worse than that description sounds. I’m not, however, gonna be a retard and say “Dimmu Borgir have lost it!”…because they never had it.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL179

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

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

SKULL178

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Friar Wagner

TAAKE, Nekro (2007, Dark Essence)

The skull:
Stark and haunting, skully and spooky, moonlit and creepy, this is a very effective skull cover which would have been PERFECT without that stupid “True Norwegian Blah Blah” banner in the bottom right corner.

The music:
There might not be a more prototypical Norwegian black metal band than Taake. They’ve been doing it since 1995 and continue to this day, no major changes and no turning away from what they originally set out to do. This EP came out in 2007, and its main song, the 11+ minutes of “Hennes Kalde Skamlepper,” is as good an example of Taake’s sound as any. Cold, buzzy, reverb-drenched riffs, fast-and-faster rhythms, and your usual Quorthon-derived vocals on top (ie. the guy sounds like Nocturno Culto in Darkthrone’s early/mid ’90s era, but sharper and even more scathing). There’s a bit of ambient guitar landscaping in the middle of this lengthy song, and after it kicks in again there are some odd Skoll-like bass lines happening (think Ved Buens Ende). Shorter track “Voldtekt” opens up the EP; it’s a frosty, blazing sort of thing, akin to something off Darkthrone’s similarly single-minded Transilvanian Hunger. Taake also covers Von’s “Lamb” here, and it works well enough to draw the line of influence from Von’s primitive weirdness to the basics of “True Norwegian Black Metal.” Which, by the way, Taake boasts about playing on the cover of Nekro, in case there was any question about it. This little banner also adds “Piss Off & Fuck Off,” which I will do right now. It’s cool that they don’t ask us to die after fucking off, which is usually how it goes, you know?
— Friar Wagner

SKULL177

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Friar Johnsen

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