Category Archives: Skull

Skull of the day

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NODE, In the End Everything is a Gag  (2010, Scarlet)

The skull:
Got the whole Rorschach test artwork approach going on…kind of. You can spot tiny variations, but ultimately it’s yet another skull cover that plants a skull in the middle of the frame and chucks a mess of formless junk at it, plasters it around the skull and calls it good. Is it really good? I guess it’s better than many we see here at BDS HQ. We sure would like to see the skull a lot bigger though…any skull smaller usually gets stuffed into the Honorable Mentions closet and forgotten about. But man, look at all that junk! That skull ain’t gettin’ outta there any time soon. What it all has to do with the album title I have absolutely no idea…

The music:
For as long as this Italian band has been around, it sure seems like no one has cared very much. Constantly under the radar, their music is of a consistently high quality, in terms of performance, but do they deliver something special, something to treasure and revisit year after year? Not really. Albums and songs have their moments throughout their discography, but it never feels essential and never draws you back for repeated listens. This album, their fifth, is their least remarkable yet, ruined by vocals that are the epitome of modern metalcore screaming — interchangeable with the hundreds of other bands that sound like this. So fucking vanilla. Think Anselmo-meets-Lindberg…yep, that thing. Musically, nearly every song has a cool riff, an unexpected rhythmic shift, or a comes-out-of-nowhere spiraling melodic guitar line or theme (“Masks of Life”), but as a whole it’s forgettable stuff. The Billy Idol cover (“Rebel Yell”) is lame, although you gotta give them credit for trying. Ultimately, they’re heading down the metalcore road and that’s a mistake. They’re too experienced to be jumping on bandwagons, and they’ve chosen the worst bandwagon to jump on. Node? Nope.
— Friar Wagner

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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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SKULLTORCH, demo (2007)

The skull:
It would seem this skull is floating in a forest in autumn, with leaves actively falling across his brow. And he looks pretty pissed off about the situation. Very simple black and white, with a totally generic logo at the top. The skull is not even mounted on top of a torch or anything. Maybe he’s on a quest for the torch, roaming through dense endless forests, and when he finds it in the castle the reunion will be glorious and many elves and dwarves will come together to celebrate the completeness of skulltorch and all will be joyous in the kingdom.But it’s probably just another ill-conceived album cover from a band that lacks a bit of vision.

The music:
This Belgian band haven’t followed up this utterly forgettable four-song demo yet, so we’re going on six years there. Not surprising, as they really had nothing important to say in the first place. It doesn’t get much more boring than this: Pantera-influenced groove metal punctuated with the kind of mid-paced death metal Unleashed were doing around the time of the Warrior album or what Gorefest started doing on False and Soul Survivor. But see, that makes Skulltorch sound almost good, and they’re not. While the drummer is clearly talented, the two-chord chug riffs and even some of the vocal patterns are not that far from nu-metal level inanity. I’ll take a pass and hope that someday one of these modern metal bands with a skull cover on their demo will be totally amazing.
— Friar Wagner

 

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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

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BOARDERS, Rust of 99  (1999, self-released)

The skull:
This poor thing. Bleached white and lonely, with an elongated cranium that’s getting into John Merrick territory. He looks sad and worried. But his teeth are in great shape. Another of those last-minute, totally uncreative skull covers that seems to have absolutely no purpose other than filling up space.

The music:
Boarders also doubles as a Megadeth tribute band and they probably do okay with that in their Italian homeland. Their original material is along the lines of Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction and Youthanasia, the clean, streamlined stuff, but this covers EP shows a slightly rawer Boarders (are they skateboarders?). You get covers of Helloween, Megadeth, Metallica (a cool choice of “Escape”), AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Testament songs. Competently performed with no big surprises, although the vocals are uniformly terrible. Oh, and there’s a drum solo tacked onto the end. You’ll do without this one just fine.
— Friar Wagner

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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

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JOE THRASHER, Metal Forces  (2009, self-released)

The skull:
Love it. Just endearingly dumb, this silly skull grins madly under a dorky logo. The black and red simplicity makes it look like some NWOBHM 7 inch. Very much looks like the skull of famous DC comics villain the Joker, if he were to be de-fleshed…particularly the ’50s/’60s era one, if we’re being really nerdy.

The music:
Plus points for naming this album after the great UK metal magazine of yore. Onslaught had their “Metal Forces” song decades ago, but Joe Thrasher probably doesn’t know that, or maybe they just don’t care. What do we have here? We have a group of Canadians hellbent on playing the strictest interpretation of ’80s thrash possible. They’ve studied up on their countrymen, as lots of this album reminds of Canuck thrashers like Razor and Piledriver. The playing is fine, the riffing and solos are vice-tight, so it does the requisite thrash thing there. The vocals are a not-very-vicious snarl that’s like Vince Neil trying to do thrash, or Steve Souza trying to do Vince Neil. At just under 27 minutes, these nine songs blaze by without much to distinguish one from the other. They all thrash like hell, though every now and then they churn along in a mid-paced bore (“The March”). “The March” is worse than the worst Manowar (and I like Manowar, for the most part). The lyrics are dumb as fuck. This would have gone mostly unnoticed on an old label like Mean Machine or New Renaissance back in the day, so it sure as shit doesn’t measure up now.
— Friar Wagner

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ENTOMBED, Stranger Aeons  (1992, Earache)

The skull:
Under one of the best metal logos of all-time, an encircled skull and crossbones sits humbly, demanding your attention. It’s simple and effective enough, the gray/black negative-image style treatment working well in conveying starkness and darkness. But I don’t know, it’s still kinda stock. This design was seen first on the band’s Clandestine album, featured on the cover of this EP, and also was spotted on the Wolverine Blues album. They also used it on a later self-titled collection, so they really tried to get as much mileage out of it as possible. Look real close and you’ll even see it on the Hollowman EP somewhere.

The music:
On the heels of the Clandestine album, this 3-song EP was released to keep it going…not that it was ever in danger of stopping. That album, and their first, remain at the top of all-time death metal album lists 20+ years later. So, the label pulled “Stranger Aeons” off Clandestine, and it’s a great choice. At a short-ish 3:26, the song finds the band’s signature ultra-fat guitar sound delivering killer riff after killer riff, not least of which is the main one: a lumbering, crushing, grooved monster that recalls Dark Angel’s “No One Answers.” Great riffs, great tones, great leads, and just okay vocals by Nicke Andersson. Speaking of whom, he and guitarist Uffe Cederlund snuck into the studio in late 1991 and recorded two songs that didn’t make the album, “Dusk” and “Shreds of Flesh,” and those are both here. These songs are even shorter than the main track, 2:42 and 2:04, and they’re good, but they suffer a little bit in sounding samey to what we’ve already heard from the band. No surprise that they changed direction after this, snipping off the fat a la Carcass’ Heartwork and changing direction in an effort to stay fresh. Fuck yeah, early ’90s Entombed! You can’t beat it.
— Friar Wagner

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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

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BAJEN DEATH CULT, Bajen-a-voo-doo (2004, Tifo)

The skull:
A leering skull, silhouetted in green, and wearing a bone necklace or something. He looks quite smug, actually, which is not too surprising, considering he’s just some asshole Swedish hooligan (although surely there’s a more appropriate Swedish term of art). We apologize for the shitty low-res scan of the cover, but physical copies are only available at the stadium, and the people who already own this keep it behind glass in their personal shrines.

The music:
People in the United States often take sports WAY too seriously, but there is really nothing in American sport that compares to the insanity of European football superfandom. Take for instance Bajen Death Cult, a band formed by members of Grave, Unleashed, Grand Magus, and Necrophobic in order to sing songs about their local team, Hammerby IF. Grown men, in other words, writing, rehearsing, and recording songs about soccer. This is not an isolated incident, either. All metalheads should know by now that “Up the Irons” is a rallying cry not so much for Iron Maiden, but for West Ham United. Years before their first album, Vanden Plas released a single in tribute to 1. FC Kaiserslautern. Bobby Schotowski (Crows, Sodom) and Waldemar Sorychta (Despair, Grip Inc., producer of every good LP on Century Media ever) formed Dortmunder Jungs to celebrate BVB-Meisterfeier. You see the pattern here. These people are all crazy. They choose their cars based on the availability of their team’s colors. They name their children after players from the 70s. They see a phrase like “Central Attacking Defensive Center Back” and nod in sage understanding. Getting back to Bajen Death Cult and their EP, this is basically raucous Hellacopters-style metal punk, with a ballad thrown in for good measure. The lyrics are all in Swedish and are about saves and slide tackles and penalty shots and handsome Nordic men taking dives and punching one another in the groin when the refs aren’t looking. I assume. Naturally, there is no reason for anyone to seek this out, lest they live in whatever tiny part of Sweden that pledges allegiance to this particular team. Go sports!
— Friar Johnsen