Tag Archives: blue

SKULL657

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NIGHTSIDE GLANCE, Twilight Visions of the Night (2005, demo)

The skull:
There’s a whole lot of “night” happening here, and I love the idea of “twilight visions of the night.” It’s like a glimpse into the future, but only an hour or so into the future. This seems to be an alternate or reissue cover, as the original has no skull but instead a pair of glaring eyes, rendered with just slightly more artistry than the Invader cover. That cover also featured a lot of lightning, and also a bit more of a twilight feel, but who needs thematic purity when you can have a skull? This guy looks like he’s auditioning to be a stuntskull for an Iced Earth cover or something, and he hardly seems interested in either twilight or glancing, but at least he’s putting in some effort, which is more can be said for a lot of the skull models we’ve seen.

The music:
This is straight-up Dimmu Borgir/Old Man’s Child worship from Belarus. I guess you’d call it “symphonic black metal” but there’s not very much here that qualifies as black metal in the traditional sense. There are a few more 6/8 parts than usual, and the vocals are croaky instead of gurgly, and maybe the lyrics are about Satan, although they’re probably just about the night. What you do get are a lot of cheesy keyboards and a powerful evocation of 1997, when this sort of thing was all the rage. If Born of the Flickering is your favorite album of all time and you collect anything that sounds like that, then you probably already own this, along with like 3000 similar discs, but on the off chance your trading network didn’t extend too far into the former Soviet bloc, then I guess now’s the time to right that wrong and pick up some Nightside Glance.
— Friar Johnsen

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ILLIDIANCE, Deformity (2013, self-released)

The skull:
The deep blue palette and the fine, soft brushwork on display here (even if it was done, as it likely was, entirely digitally) make me think of Necrolord, but there’s no way he’d ever create something as garishly stupid as this. Skull, brass knuckles, grenade, banner, sawblade, wings, outline stars, stencil AND script lettering: this cover has everything you need for like five douchey tattoos, with enough left over for two or three Affliction shirts. This is the pure, concentrated distillation of Hot Topic, in album art form.

The music:
Thuggish Soilwork style stuff, leavened by a shitpile of bloopy techno keyboards and bass drops, plus plenty of the djenty chugs that the kidz are so into these days. This is really shameless dreck, like a shittier version of Mnemic (if you can even imagine). Really, people: there is nothing more to be gained from mixing death metal howls and schmaltzy emo clean vocals. There’s no surprise in the contrast anymore, and no one will ever believe that your band is either tough OR sensitive. They will, however, immediately understand that you’re trendchasing whores without vision or talent. Read Illidiance’s Metal Archives page and you’ll be hammered over the head by this Russian band’s feckless opportunism: “Genre: Symphonic Black Metal (early), Electronic/Metal (later)…. The band now describes themselves as ‘cyber metal’.” Ugh. They even used to wear corpsepaint and are now all about full-sleeve tattoos and wraparound shades. Amazing. I guess I could give them points for making a good sounding EP, but actually, I won’t. Fuck this stupid band.
— Friar Johnsen

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DYNABYTE, 2KX (2010, self-released)

The skull:
This might have been a cool cover if someone had actually set out a skull and then projected their stupid blue gears-and-pipes collage onto it. Instead, probably a skull photo was poached from the internet and the industrial cliches were just Photoshopped in. I do like the attention paid to the teeth, though. They look nice.

The music:
Obviously, Dynabyte are industrial metal. The cover gives that away immediately. They’re like a slightly heavier KMFDM, with a little Pslam 69-era Ministry thrown in. Nothing too special, I’d say, although at their best (“Normal”, for instance) they almost approach early Pitch Shifter in quality. The female vocals, courtesy of Cadaveria, remind me a bit of early Genitorturers, although the cleaner singing is more nasal and less appealing. The growling is okay, though. Industrial metal, overall, should be a lot better than it is, but the truth is, for as simple as the ingredients are, almost no one does it properly, or at least to my tastes. It’s a genre of near-misses, of bands that never quite put the pieces together. For every Pitch Shifter, a dozen Drowns. For every Swamp Terrorists, a hundred Dynabytes. And that’s before you even start looking for the bands that out-and-out suck. But if that sort of thing appeals to you, like if you think Circle of Dust are awesome, and you own an Ugly Mustard album, then probably you’ll think Dynabyte are okay.
— Friar Johnsen

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ORODRUIN, Epicurean Mass (2003, Psychedoomelic)

The skull:
Though they originally issued the album with a terrible blue mirrored image on the cover, Orodruin wisely decided to retool with a Big Dumb Skull for the 2009 digipack reissue. This cover is also shitty and blue with a mirrored image, but at least there’s a skull dropped nonsensically on top. Epicureanism is often conflated with hedonism, or at the very least with gourmandism, but the teachings of Epicurus stressed moderation and self-control. Epicurus himself was vegetarian. His was also a materialist philosophy that rejected the supernatural and divine, so the very idea of an Epicurean Mass is a bit oxymoronic. But, having failed to do their research, Orodruin cooked up a fantasy of a gluttonous rite that ends in death for the participants, a kind of Masque of the Fat Death. Maybe they should have made the skull chubbier, then.

The music:
Sludgy doom with an epic feel, heavily indebted to Sabbath without being a slavish copy. Think: Gates of Slumber and Reverend Bizarre, although Orodruin work the trippy 70s vibe a bit more heavily than either of those bands, and incorporate less traditional 80s metal into their sound. I’m also reminded in places of Krux, although Mike Puleo is no Mats Levin. While I find this sort of music rather dull, I’m not about to say Orodruin are a bad band. If they were a little less fuzzy, a little less sloppy, and if their songs and singing were a little better, they’d almost be as good as early While Heaven Wept, which is more my kind of doom. This is also the band’s first album, and although it’s ten years old, it’s still their only full length release. I guess for some guys, it takes a long time to write a slow song, and with as much time as they’ve had to work on their follow-up, maybe the next one will be awesome.
— Friar Johnsen

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BURDEN OF GRIEF, Haunting Requiems  (2000, Point Music)

The skull:
Dirty, wretched, aged skull hangs eerily in the fog, leering and sneering. It’s the eyes that deliver the creeps: where the pupils would have been there are instead threads of blue electric energy. “Electric eye…in the sky…feel my stare…always there.” What could have been a dull and dumb cover is actually rendered well enough to convey the dread it’s supposed to. Gaze upon its countenance and shudder. Well done.

The music:
For those who lament that “melodic death metal” now means “anemic weak metalcore” versus what the originators of the form intended (early In Flames, early Dark Tranquillity, Eucharist, etc.), Burden Of Grief are here to fly the flag. More Sacramentum than Soilwork, these Germans sound Swedish as hell. The vocals throughout Haunting Requiems recall the scathing tones of early Mikael Stanne (Dark Tranquillity) and the music goes there too, along with a healthy shot of every-era At The Gates. This is like the missing link between early At The Gates and the refinement they underwent on Terminal Spirit Disease — all shimmering, haunting, minor key riffs and melodies, screaming vocals, and a triumphant, Maiden-esque sort of vibe, arranged more consisely than early At The Gates yet not quite as stripped down and ferocious as AtG would become. There’s even a cover of Iron Maiden’s “Prowler” here. The comparisons to better and better-known bands tells you Burden Of Grief are second-tier (“Smashed to Pieces” is so close to early Dark Tranquillity that it can be called a rip-off), but it’s certainly some of the better second-tier melodic death metal you’ll come across. Worth checking out if your hunger for the sound of real melodic death metal takes you out of Sweden and out of the ’90s.
— Friar Wagner