SKULL636

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM, Metal Shock (1985, demo)

The skull:
Maybe I’m prejudiced against any comedy or mockery because I love the first several F&J albums so much (and I believe I can speak for the other BDS friar on that point, as well), but I always thought this skull design was completely killer. Dig the J stabbing its way through the chasms of the eyeholes, drawing blood to boot. The logo is one of the coolest and most stylish from the American thrash wave of the 1980s. Same can’t be said for the demo title font, which I swear I’ve seen used for “Live Wire” somewhere, whatever “Live Wire” is. I know I’ve seen it. And about a million other album and fanzine titles of the era. But yeah, the skull and logo? I’d wear a shirt with that on it.

The music:
Four songs here, only one of which appeared revamped on the next year’s debut, Doomsday for the Deceiver (“Hammerhead”). There is also, of course, “I Life You Die,” which appeared later, also revamped, on their perfect-expect-for-THAT-song second album. These versions are great — obviously rawer, but with a different guitar noodle here or a different Erik A.K. shriek there. Then we have “The Evil Sheik,” which boasts a variety of riffs that are all Armored Saint-meets-Omen, a few King Diamond-ish vocal moments, and an ending that is total Iron Maiden circa 1980. Overall it’s a good song, just not great enough to pass muster for the considerably speedier debut, and obviously the most derivative of any of the Jason Newsted-penned early Flots tunes. “The Beast Within,” now this is interesting. I always felt this song lacked something next to the other three, something that easily fit into a more traditional mold. It has that spandex-and-spikes vibe of the many bands of the era that had one foot in true heavy metal and the other in cock rock. I didn’t realize until today, in examining this skull and the music inside, that it’s actually a cover song. Weird choice too: a song from Stormtrooper’s EP, Armies of the Night (1985, Ironworks)Why? Was Jason Newsted out of ideas, or from Ironworks or Stormtrooper have some blackmail-worthy dirt on him? Incidentally, Stormtrooper featured guitarist Mick Sweda, who later went on to fame in King Kobra and then again in Bullet Boys. (No wonder I smelled hairspray.) I had to check out the original version, and it’s pretty killer, like a rougher, tougher early Ratt (and I love early Ratt). Very “early Metal Massacre comps” if you know what I mean. So, not a bad song, you just wonder why Newsted and Flotsam relied on it for their second demo. Weirdness.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL628

DERANGED, Premonotory Nightmare (1988, demo)

The skull:
He wakes up in a sweat and rolls over to embrace his wife. He is shaking and clearly disturbed.

He: Baby, I had the scariest dream. It was a premonotory nightmare.

She: Oh, babe, don’t you mean “premonitory”?

He: Yeah, that’s what I said.

She: No, you said “pre-mon-OH-tory.” It’s “pre-mon-IH-tory”

He: Whatever. You’re the English teacher. Anyway…There I was, inside this dome of bone, trapped and desperate to escape. I pounded and pounded at this bone-dome —

She: Hee-hee!

He: I know. Anyway, I finally crack through this dome to find I was trapped inside of a skull! It was so weird! And by the time I emerged I was pretty much dead, one of my eyes was dangling out of its socket and I was vomiting blood! Ohhh, baby, it was AWFUL!!!

She: Sounds really scary, babe. But what’s so premonitory about it?

He: [fuming now] Never mind…

The music:
Not to belabor the theme too much, but I’m guessing the guys in Canada’s Deranged weren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, know what I’m sayin’? As far as I have read, and even observed first-hand, Vancouver, B.C. is comprised mostly of straight-up English-speaking denizens (and lots of Asians, but these guys look caucasian). So, with the misspelling in the cassette title, and the song title “Different Executioning,” you gotta wonder if any member of this five-piece band owned so much as one single dictionary among them, or made it past the 6th grade? But hey, let’s give ‘em some slack and get into the meat of the music. What we have here is some incredibly raw and vicious thrash metal that reminds a lot of early Sadus (D.T.P. demo, Illusions), Pleasure to Kill-era Kreator, Gammacide’s Victims of Science, and Morbid Saint’s Spectrum of Death. With the later receiving enough posthumous acclaim that the band reunited, you hope that eventually this demo and and the next one, 1989’s Place of Torment (which is even better and more intense than this), would find a proper reissue and repackaging. I would totally buy it. The riffs are good, some are even unique enough as to be memorable, the energy is very high, the playing is pro, and Scott Murdoch’s vocals are absolutely maniacal. They may have performed poorly in English class, but they were experts in the ways of ultra-intense thrash metal, and for that, I give them a solid A grade.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL620

MASOCHIST, The Extent of Human Error (2012, UKEM)

The skull:
I think I know what’s going on here. Try and stay with me on this. This guy was down in the Upper Big Branch Mine in Birchton, WV, when an explosion occurred (the same explosion depicted in Skull616). The flashlight on this unfortunate miner’s helmet fused to his recently de-fleshed skull in the wake of the explosion. The hand we see here does not belong to the skull, or at least, it’s not attached to a body any longer. There it hangs, grafted onto a bloodied rock slab. This is all very disturbing, and we Friars stand with the Council of the Elders of the Skull in stating that “Mining disasters are not funny, even if skull covers are often hilarious.” We admit being conflicted on how to feel about this one.

The music:
This EP is sooooo 1994. It’s got that post-peak vibe to it, that peculiar sound of decent, capable death metal bands who have learned their lessons well and bring a laudable vibe of death, doom and darkness to bear in their own brand of death metal while putting nothing forth that hasn’t come before. They go slightly weird for about three measures of “Crucify the Whore” with some jarring, industrial noises, and they give a nod to pig-grunt “rhee-rhee-rhee” vocal silliness on “Born Fucked,” but generally it’s straightforward grindy death. You can either consider this many, many, many years too late, or a throwback to that gray era of “what now?” just beyond death metal’s peak years (1988-1993). Either way it’s a no-win, making it difficult to endorse this band unless you treasure those mid ‘90s albums by Killing Addiction, Internal Bleeding and Desecration (UK) as the very acme of the death metal art.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL612

LOTRIFY, Demo  (2011, demo)

The skull:
Demo. This is the album cover for this demo, the Lotrify demo. The one called Demo. The one with the skull on it. The one in which the skull cries tears of blood because he’s been relegated to a demo called Demo. From a Swiss band nobody really cares about. But he’s got a massive fucking canine and he’s gonna bite down on that logo for all its worth, to show his fellow skull pals, the ones from the Krokus, Overkill and Saint Vitus covers, that he, too, is to be feared!!!

The music:
Demo. This is music from the demo, the Lotrify demo. The one called Demo. And not only does it sounds like a demo, but the composition and delivery is clearly coming from kids who have just started trying to figure out how to write a song. They’re probably influenced by Metallica, Megadeth, Evergrey and Sanctuary, from the sound of it. They clearly have a long way to go before they can match the achievements of those bands, but they’re clearly capable, from a pure performance level, except for the vocalist. Each instrument-wielder seems pretty capable, the drums and bass sometimes outclassing the occasional ham-fisted guitar part, but for overall it’s a laudable effort. The vocalist, well, he’s pretty much crap. Not only does he warble weakly in his semi-melodic, semi-Hetfield-ian delivery, but the lyrics are laughable. And the songs themselves, these are not great, and are sometimes a hell of a mess (“Shadow of the Unknown”). And guess what “Sahara” does? It features mystical Eastern melodies. Bet you didn’t see that coming. The vocals in “Sahara” are amongst the poorest I’ve heard since starting this blog and these lyrics show that there is not even the slightest attempt at metaphor. This is what’s happening, right here! “I’m walking through Sahara without water in my bag /
The heat is smashing me down and my sight is turning red/ I trip over my own feet and my body hits the sandy floor.” But okay, they’re young. I’d say the cover of Demo advertises exactly what you get when the music starts playing. It’s time to get lotrified people! Lotrify it up! Omednikcufecin!
— Friar Wagner

SKULL571

OSCO, Death (2012, demo)

The skull:
I once did a very similar pencil drawing in art class, only the skull had a hole cut into it and a little peg inserted underneath. It was a birdhouse, you see. How clever I was. The skull was actually very well drawn (I still have it) although that was only possible because I spent hours and hours merely transcribing the lines from a realistic plastic skull I had bought at the Halloween store. I had to ask my art teacher for help with the peg, because I couldn’t get the perspective right without actually seeing the thing in real life. My point is that even a high school kid with almost no artistic skill could have drawn this skull. But it took a real hack, a person of low morals and even lower technical ability, to have inserted these glowing spiders, stars, and #f00 red blood with MS Paint or whatever cheap drawing program came preinstalled on his Dell. The modifications made to this skull drawing practically count as vandalism.

The music:
This demo is the work, I must assume, of a kid in his mid teens, because I refuse to believe that any adult would release something so terrible into the wider world. This kid can’t write, can’t play, can’t growl, has no idea how drums are played (and so no idea how to program lifelike beats), and can’t work Garage Band. This is so bad that it wouldn’t even convince as a jokey ridicule of death metal in a rotten TV show. There doesn’t appear to be any bass at all. There is generally only a single guitar, and that guitar is almost never in time. If you’re a fan of outsider art, then maybe this will tickle every ironic bone in your body. If you’re a fan of the Osco chain of pharmacies, however, you’re in for a rude awakening here.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL544

SATAN’S SATYRS, Die Screaming  (2014, Bad Omen)

The skull:
Here we see something not meant for the public’s eyes. Lacking anything but a bony head to work with, a skull needs to get his sexual kicks in ways we fleshy folk might find bizarre. A skull positions himself under any kind of signage dripping blood (you know the signage), causing an agonizing sort of orgasm, all that hot blood splashing onto his face and into his mouth. Hot hot hot! Now, look away. You have seen too much already.

The music:
Duty and obsession lead me immediately to song number 5, “Show Me Your Skull,” and what it offers is kind of interesting. I’m highly suspicious of most of these retro-rock/retro-heavy metal bands, who offer absolutely nothing new and usually can’t write songs that measure up with the old masters (Witchcraft being a major exception). But Satan’s Satyrs are interesting. Their guitar tone is jangly and clean, reminding a bit of old ’70s band Dust. The energy is equally jumpy, raucous and kinetic, and the song structures and melodies are redolent of some weird fusion of ’70s-era Pentagram, early Cirith Ungol and classic Kiss. There are whiffs of punk and surf music here too. The ghosts of MC5 and Stooges lurk not very far under the surface. Sorta like if Venom was actually a punk rock band. And that’s just “Show Me Your Skull.” And that’s just the music. The vocals are hugely appealing, partly because they sound like no one else that I can recall. Bassist Claythanas, as he’s known, delivers these tales of pulp novel satanism with a bratty, whiny, fragile, sneering delivery. While that sounds horrible on paper, it actually works to give these songs additional color and intrigue. The rest of the songs are good, with a consistency that offers no standouts but no real duds either. I can’t believe I’m enjoying this retro-steeped album, but then I like a lot of the original bands this is based on, so perhaps it was time that a totally worthwhile band like this came along. Much better than Graveyard, trust me.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL516

PAGAPU, Seven Days of Storm (2011, Pentagram)

The skull:
This image would be creepy as fuck if it weren’t for one little detail. I mean, the mouth of the skull being bionically extended by devices that look unpickable locks and a big thick blade…and all that dripping blood. Not to mention those fearsome tusk-like protusions from each side of the head. All of it pretty wicked. But that half-circle thingy that the top of the head is inserted into doesn’t quite look like the brace or head-belt that is likely its technical function. It just looks like a cute paper nurse hat from some tiny third world country lucky enough to have just enough of a budget to supply their nurses with hats at all. Not very evil!

The music:
A collection of demo recordings and various other odds and sods from this hopelessly obscure Peruvian one-man band. Most of this was recorded between 2003 and 2005, but the vibe is of another, earlier time, like Italy, Czech Republic or Greece circa 1989, with a foggy delivery of primitive death metal and embryonic traces of the buzzy early ’90s black metal sound. Exactly the sort of thing that would have fit perfectly on Wild Rags Records back in the day. I found myself digging this, as I’m occasionally a sucker for nuttiness of this sort. It reminds of the earliest emantations and rawest recordings of Rotting Christ, Varathron, Masters Hammer, Profanatica, Absu, Incantation, Von and Goatlord. A reviewer on Metal Archives says of one of the demos “good music, very poor vocals,” yet my impression is about the exact opposite: the vocals are much more interesting than the sometimes hamfisted and/or dull music. But sometimes the music is engaging enough, as with the suffocating bleakness of “Wanka Attack.” Worthwile despite its flaws, but only if you’re into some of that crazy-raw Wild Rags stuff and some of the other aforementioned noisemakers. (I had hoped to use the “Pagapoo-poo” insult, but no, I like this enough to refrain.)
— Friar Wagner

SKULL512

BLOOD ERECTION, Unceasing Bleeding  (2011, Casket Music)

The skull:
This band is named after a curious medical condition usually suffered only by sexual psychopaths, in which the sight of enormous amounts of blood produces an extraordinarily stiff and long-lasting erection. In the picture on the cover of Unceasing Bleeding, we see one particularly extreme case of blood erection, wherein the entire body became engorged, eventually stiffened then swelled until it all exploded in one ungodly, sanguine mess. We see only the skull here, underneath the pathologist’s plastic, as there was nothing left to salvage of the erection itself, or the rest of the body for that matter.

The music:
Unfortunately, the music of Greece’s Blood Erection isn’t even close to conjuring the gloriously gory imagery the band name and album cover have led us to firmly believe in. We get that they believe their music totally depicts such insanity, but you’d have to be a gullible metal novice to buy into this stuff. At best, Blood Erection sounds like an adequate knock-off of one of the more forgettable Cannibal Corpse albums. If words like “adequate,” “knock-off” and “forgettable Cannibal Corpse albums” describe the kind of death metal that makes you so hard your pecker could burst, this is your favorite new band! The rest of you move along…nothing to see, or hear, here.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL490

RAM, Death  (2012, Metal Blade)

The skull:
Friends of the (horned) skull, Ram, return with another album cover featuring a human skull with curly ram horns affixed to it. The look is deliberate ’80s kitsch, and it’s an ugly mess. I think they’re trying to impress us here at BDS, utilizing every single popular feature of your typical skull cover: horns, crosses, ruined city, blood, an ominous winged figure. You can imagine this as a video game. The background is static, except for the upward-moving blood streaks, which pulse with each hit of the player’s fire button. That button allows the player to shoot crosses into the eye sockets of the skull, which moves erratically, gaining speed and intensity as the player progresses to each new level. Once you shoot 1000 crosses into the skull’s eyes, you’re at the 10th level. The skull disappears as the winged figure at the back becomes animated, growing slowly in an attempt to overtake the player. The shooter needs to shoot 100 crosses each into the figures wings or lose the game in defeat. Naturally, Ram music plays in the background. It’s a whole lot better than that Journey video game, right?

The music:
How much you like this depends on how much you like Iron Maiden and don’t mind other bands sounding a lot like Iron Maiden. Since Maiden themselves hardly sound like this anymore, Ram is a sufficient analog for the galloping, energetic, double-guitar attack that the English legends patented and turned into a very profitable industry. Ram is a good band, with good riffs and an earnest approach that’s hard to dislike, but how much you like them will depend on how adventurous a listener you are. Do you go to a restaurant that offers a menu loaded with choices and order the same dish every time? Do you go to the exact same place every single year for vacation? Do you go to Baskin Robbins and order a double scoop of vanilla? Ram isn’t all Iron Maiden worship though. Sometimes you hear traces of Judas Priest.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL438

THRALL, Vermin to the Earth  (2011, Moribund)

The skull:
Thrall not only love the skull, but they love the skull with snakes knotting themselves in and out of various cavities within our favorite boney body part. This one is a little more complex than the other Thrall art we featured way back in Skull183. While we like to take shots at all the stupid artwork that comes our way in this project, there’s nothing here to poke fun of. It’s a seriously great piece of art, and this Friar is especially down with the black blood dripping out of the skull’s eye sockets. Totally morbid.

The music:
I’d heard of Thrall quite a bit over the years, but never actually gave the band a listen until today. The first thing my ear goes to is the quality of the sounds. Not so much the songs, but the overall atmosphere. Thrall achieve an interesting sonic aesthetic: the guitars
are crisp and earthy, the drums dry and raw (but not dinky), the bass pumps out at just the right level, and the vocals are layed over everything perfectly, neither dominant nor buried. Other than a few minor effects on the vocals, everything sounds unadorned. Where that
might otherwise be a criticism (I dig studio manipulation), Thrall makes it work. It betrays a leaning toward traditional hard rock values, although Thrall don’t necessarily rock (well, “Plague of Man” sorta does). They don’t hide behind a ton of reverb or other effects, because they have the playing capability to twist sounds and melodies into otherworldly things without needing to overuse effects. But are the songs good? They’re okay. Something like “Oblivion” is even more than okay, featuring a couple interesting riffs. It partly exhumes the old-school simplicity of Bathory and Darkthrone, but with a kind of inspired intellectualism that resides in the realm of a band like Deathspell Omega, yet not quite that complex or tangled. Basically, Thrall straddles the line that separates ancient black metal and more modern approaches. I can continue to live without it — there’s probably not a metal sub-genre I’m pickier about than black metal — but I know a lot of people really like this band, and I can totally understand why.
— Friar Wagner