Tag Archives: boring

SKULL550

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SCAR TISSUE, D.S.B.M.  (demo, 2012)

The skull:
This is why you never let your cover subject choose your album title (in this case, demo title). The sole dude in Scar Tissue (friends call him “Scar-T” for short) allowed the skull to give a title to his time in the spotlight. Since Scar-T didn’t bothter to do shit in terms of concept, setting or even lame Photoshoppery, doing nothing but placing the skull on a pedestal and having a reasonably talented medical school pal pencil-draw him, our hero didn’t have much to work with. Including brains. He spit out, in a barely audible, creaky, , wheezing croak, “Dumb…Skull…Big…Metal.” D.S.B.M. That’s good enough for us here at B.D.S.

The music:
Okay, so in real life, D.S.B.M. stands for Depressive Swedish Black Metal. Guess what kind of music Scar Tissue plays? Have you connected the dots yet? Good. But don’t waste too much time on it. Scar Tissue released this one-song demo, then another one song demo in 2013 (also featuring a skull on the cover, a more deteriorated version of this one), and then broke up. Depressing, eh? Not really. “Drained of All Life” delivers exactly what’s advertised. It’s okay if you dig this sort of thing, but it’s got about as much appeal to me as some third-tier Russian funeral doom band. Sort of a bastard child of early Katatonia and Thergothon, but not even as cool as that sounds. A+ for buzzing, creepy, dank, suffocating, cobweb-smothered atmosphere, C- for durability and appeal.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL549

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MEMORAIN, Evolution (2012, Maple Metal)

The skull:
Ah, this old chestnut, the crusty, shooped skull wreathed in flames. Add some snakes and you’ve got a Kataklysm cover. Add some tentacles and you’ve got a Feast for Crows cover. Add, well, a little more fire, and you’ve got a Dismember cover. Enough is enough, people! Try wreathing your skulls in something novel. Marshmallows, maybe, or Hot Wheels, or kittens. Memorain could have just piled up copies of On the Origin of Species under their skull, and they’d have had a thematically relevant BDS. Think outside the firebox, is what I’m suggesting to all you aspiring BDSers.

The music:
Memorain are one of those Greek bands with mysterious cash reserves, enough to hire, say, Gene Hoglan, Steve Di’Giorgio, and Ralph Santolla (that is: three quarters of the Individual Thought Patterns touring lineup) to play on their middling power metal album. The album before this featured Nick Menza on drums, and for some reason, on Evolution, they let Dave Ellefson write a song, and even worse, let Tim Owens sing it. It’s not that Memorain are bad (for the most part), but they are kind of dull, and for as much as they must have spent for the rhythm section, you’d think they’d have put a little more cash into the mixing, because this is not an especially good sounding album. DiGiorgio, in particular, is hard to hear, which is too bad because it sounds like he’s really going nuts on some of these tracks. Hoglan, though, delivers one of his most mercenary, uninspired performances. He’s perfectly in time, but creatively checked out. As for Santolla, well, who cares? That guy is never especially interesting, right? The whole affair is thoroughly basted in tough-guy posturing, and despite not sounding like any one band (that you could name – bands like this always sound like other unknown bands, probably in a case of convergent evolution), they manage to still come off as totally generic: power metal for Pantera lovers, or something. At times they sound depressingly like modern Overkill (but not Ironbound), and while I do harbor a deep and admittedly irrational love for those Jersey boys, that love absolutely does not extend to other groups peddling lame modern groove thrash. Memorain aren’t even close to a terrible band, and by the standards of the average Big Dumb Skull entrant, they rate in the top ten percent, easy, but that doesn’t make listening to their album all that much more enjoyable, only less painful.
— Friar Johnsen

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SCENTERIA, Art of Aggression (2004, New Aeon Media)

The skull:
An interesting attempt to make one very dull and boring skull look somewhat arty, with the tiled/mosaic sort of treatment. Mission half accomplished. The mid 2000s was when a ton of metal album cover art was rendered in browns, and while this one is mostly on the bone-white end of the spectrum, it has that same dull color scheme so many albums of this era had. Dull, dull, dull…but perfectly big and dumb. We roundly approve!

The music:
As with the album cover, Art of Aggression is competent and professional, but lacking in all originality. What to call this? There’s a strong foundation in post-’80s Testament and Overkill style thrash (chunky and downtuned), a hint of melodic death metal (they are from Sweden), and you assume they have a few Pantera records in their collection. Cut-and-paste death/thrash typical of the aughts, but if In Flames had written songs like  “Dead Point of View” or “Acts of Lunacy,” older fans would have lapped it up instead of shying away from whatever it is In Flames is doing these days. “Dead Point of View” is a good summation of the cover art too.
— Friar Wagner

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OERJGRINDER, Skull Head (2005, demo)

The skull:
And thus, with this Belgian band, the Skullection begins delving into the depths of obscurity for worthy skull covers. This one’s big and dumb mos’ def’! Plain white skull over a combat-green background, and the demo’s called Skull Head, which makes us wonder: what other kind of head is there? The band’s completely unmemorable name is written in terrifically unreadable death metal graffiti that we wish wasn’t obscuring the skull so much, but the unimaginative concept here is one we cherish.

The music:
At least this band knows it: the slogan over the top of the skull reads: “Creator of Stupido Grinding Stonecore.” As death/grind goes it’s as competently played as it is white-label generic. The kind of stuff that’s fun and funny for about 30 seconds, then you move on and remember there’s more to life than this sort of time-wasting superficiality. They may have grown up a little since this early demo, I don’t know. They’ve released six albums since this demo came out, in addition to the almost mandatory splits and EPs favored by bands of this sort. They’ve even recorded some “acoustic grindcore” material. It all makes me want to scream “grow up!!!,” but then again I’m a grown man writing about skull album covers, so what do I know?
— Friar Wagner