Tag Archives: awesome

SKULL559

Posted on by
Reply

CROSSFIRE, Second Attack (1985, Mausoleum)

The skull:
Another fine architectural skull, to go with my personal favorite, Overkill’s The Years of Decay. Really, you can’t go wrong with a mysterious temple for your cover (see also: Borrowed Time by Diamond Head), and if that temple is also a skull, you’re pretty much set. The best thing about this particular temple is, of course, the goofy eyes. I imagine the court architect building this thing and inviting the head priest to a private unveiling, and the priest saying, “Jeez, man, this is pretty scary. This is a place of worship – we don’t want to turn people off. Can you do anything to tone it down a little? I mean, the skull is totally cool, and I love how the stairs go right into the mouth, that’s great, but I think that people are gonna be too scared to even think about coming in.” And because the architect serves at the pleasure of his religious leaders, he accordingly toned down the menace of his work, but in the most passive-aggressive, ‘fuck you’ way possible: with big googly eyes. Had he found a classier solution, maybe he wouldn’t have been the first human sacrifice offered in the new temple.

The music:
This is some fairly awesome Accept-style speed metal from Belgium. I had heard of Crossfire before, and had probably listened to a song or two, but I had never committed to listening to an entire album before now, and I must say, this is excellent stuff. The music is pretty standard mid-80s Belgian fare, played tight and fast, but the songs are very well written and Peter DeWint’s vocals are amazing, reminding me a bit of Perry McCarty (Warrior). This being an album from 1985, there are a couple leaden ballads, but the faster tunes, like “Atomic War,” “Feeling Down,” and the title track are all winners. Honestly, I’ve never been a big Accept fan, mainly because I think Udo’s singing is the pits, but if Restless and Wild were fronted by this guy, it would probably be an all-time favorite of mine. Now I’ve got to find this on CD, along with the other Crossfire albums. I’m sure that won’t be a brutal wallet reaming…
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL532

Posted on by
Reply

E.S.T., Live in the Outskirts of Moscow (1993, Mausoluem)

The skull:
Da, comrade, we are having knife. Yes, and gun. You need gun? Take gun, take! Is lightning you need? Also we are having lightning, and star too, yes. Is warm hat you need? Take hat, is bearing leaf of marijuana plant, is very cool. We are having everything you need comrade, and hard rocking, also. E.S.T. has eye out for you! Ha, comrade! You like joke? We are having good humor, for spirit of worker is in us. E.S.T. have many things, have all things, provided by party, for glory of Russia. Go, comrade, and fight, and rock for Russia!

The music:
I’d never heard of E.S.T. (which stands for Electro Shock Therapy) before, but that’s no great surprise, as my awareness of Russian metal is pretty scant. Then again, if I had ever encountered this band before, I would have quickly beat feet in the other direction, as they sound like the non-union Russian equivalent of Razor’s Edge-era AC/DC, with a bit of late The Cult thrown in for good measure (and okay, a little of the more rockin’ Aria sounds of the late 80s, which is really the best thing about E.S.T.) The first half of this compilation is their performance at the 1991 Monsters of Rock festival in Russia (supposedly, although rumors of live-in-the-studio abound), so clearly they were a band of some stature in their homeland, and their music is well played and well put together (even if the vocals are rather shitty, in a Chris Boltendahl way), so I guess if you like that kind of not-quite metal and you don’t mind (mostly) Russian lyrics, then you’d probably love this like I love Aspid and Valkyria, but if you already think one AC/DC was one too many, then you’ll find them twice as bad as their dull inspirations.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL395

Posted on by
Reply

INFINITUM OBSCURE, Ipsus Universum (2009, Blood Harvest)

The skull:
Originally released as half of a split with Ancient Gods on Utterly Somber Creations in 2003, these Infinitum Obscure tracks were later reissued as a standalone 10″, and that’s when they were graced with this excellent skull cover. That swirly shit in the background is maybe a callback to the original art, which was just a lame purple vortex, but obviously, the real attraction here is the skull egg issuing a bat-winged demon baby made of fire. I can’t even believe how awesome that description sounds, and I’m sure I can’t add to the greatness of this image. Let’s just bask for a moment in its magnificence. You know, before that demon baby grows up and eats us alive or impregnates our skulls or whatever. It’s best not to think where this is all headed, really.

The music:
Ipsus Universum is a pretty even mix of death and black metal, reminding me of mid-period Old Man’s Child (In Defiance of Existence and Vermin), when they mostly dropped the keyboards and got back to their death metal roots. This is riffy and dense music, with a lot of musical twists and some fairly impressive playing. Infinitum Obscure are definitely fans of Morbid Angel, too, but that sound unsurprisingly meshes well with 6/8 black metal. All in all, this is an intense listen, and a very well-crafted release. I’m not often in the mood for this sort of thing, but I might have to track this down for those times when I am. The production is a little murkier than I like, and the vocals are hit or miss, but the music is great and the vibe is pretty seriously evil. Usually the abuse of Latin is a clear-cut signal of awfulness in metal, but somehow Infinitum Obscure have bucked the trend.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL294

Posted on by
1

VIRAL LOAD, Bashed Fucking Skull (1997, demo)

The skull:
My uncle has always been an early adopter type. Whatever was the hot new gadget, he got it, and made the most out of it. In the early days of PCs, he was fond of a program called Print Shop. It was a primitive graphics package primarily used to create greeting cards and flyers for bake sales and other ephemera. Early versions were, of course, monochrome and designed for use with dot matrix printers. Anyway, we would often get birthday cards or whatnot created in Print Shop, in all their stock graphics glory. You couldn’t do a lot with Print Shop, and Photo Shop it most certainly wasn’t, and pretty quickly a seasoned user of the software would find himself creating basically the same images as everyone else, because basically you had no choice. Print Shop lived on through the early days of color inkjet printers, but it eventually proved so limiting (and its output so ghastly) that it faded into the mists of pre-internet legend. But I guess at least one person was still using it in 1997, because this cover, with its plastic images, the corny squished skulls on the back of the J-card, the bizarre phantasmagoria of a background, the shitty extruded font, etc., could only have been made in Print Shop. I applaud that last, lonely user, who in his DIY zeal to get his music heard, conceived and delivered unto this world a Big Dumb Skull as gloriously stupid as this. The world is unlikely to see finer in these late technodystopian days.

The music:
Oh man, I am totally psyched for this. Eastern European heavy metal at its finest. Lemme just cue this up and hit play… Uh. Wait. There must be some mistake. This doesn’t appear to be the decades-late Croatian answer to Tygers of Pan Tang. This is some kind of shitty brutal death metal? With a drum machine? What the fuck? Now the cover doesn’t make sense AT ALL. This is the sort of idiot gore metal that demands a cover of, I dunno, lacerated tits or something. Something that combines pimply misogyny with a ton of blood. This cover isn’t going to offend anyone (except those last few old ladies still clutching their pearls at swear words) and it utterly fails to represent Viral Load honestly. Then again, if you really knew what you were in for, you’d never listen to this, so maybe the Trojan Horse strategy was a wise one. Sucker people in with the promise of totally unironic metal and then when they least expect it, BAM, you hit them with your half-assed Skinless worship. That’s almost certainly giving Viral Load too much credit for cleverness, but literally nothing else could possibly explain the marriage of this music and this cover. It’s a fucked-up world, though.
— Friar Johnsen