Tag Archives: bullet hole

SKULL634

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DISARM GOLAITH, Man, Machine and Murder (2008, Casket)

The skull:
Man? We’ll take their word for it that this skull belonged to a male.

Check.

Machine? It’s sort of cyborg-y, this skull, and a fightin’ cyborg at that, judging by the bullet hole. So okay, a machine.

Check.

Murder? Do they really have to spell it out for us? This skull – which once carried the flesh and guts of a male member of the species – is a goddamn fightin’ machine, and if that red color behind him is to symbolize all the blood he’s bathing in after all that fightin’, then yeah, there’s a ton of murderin’ goin’ on in this cyborg skull’s warring world.

Check.

The music:
If Onslaught had kept Steve Grimmett on vocals and continued their evolution, kind of working backwards in the development of heavy metal’s sub-genre expansion, might have, in another album or two, arrived it a sound like the one claimed by Disarm Goliath, this kind of raucous yet classy, tough but melodic traditional heavy metal sound. Unfortunately D.G.’s Man, Machine and Murder EP is not recorded very well, and while the passion is clearly there, not even the most earnest delivery can help if the songs are mediocre, and these songs are mediocre without exception. The spirit is there though, so if your standards for traditional heavy metal aren’t sky-high when it comes to newer bands, then this will fit your craving for merely decent metal (I checked out another D.G. song, “Embrace the Abyss,” from their second album, which came out several years after this EP, and holy cow, it sounds a lot like Onslaught’s “Shellshock.” So there you go.)
— Friar Wagner

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TANK GENOCIDE, Devil Temptation  (2013, Infernal Commando)

The skull:
When the head craniologist (no pun intended) handed the intern a skull and a tiny ruler and said “can you get a measurement on that?,” he wasn’t fucking talking about the goddamn teeth. “The bullet hole, stupid, the bullet hole!” Kid’s interning down at the local Stop-n-Shop convenience store now, fucking up counts of cases of Red Bull and boxes of Slim Jim. No rocket scientist, he.

The music:
Tank Genocide is the work of yet another French fruitcake who hates all non-Aryan human beings and releases about 47 cassette demos per year to tell everyone all about it. Anyone who will listen anyway. Which is probably about 14 people. I’m all for sick, fuzzy, ultra-bleak blizzards of black metal noise, but if it’s junk, it’s junk, and this is junk. Not that I have any concern for the welfare of the Nationalist Socialist Black Metal movement, but it would probably not be such an easy-to-dismiss joke if more of the bands were actually good.  With song titles like “Fuck the Pretentious Wankers” (guess that would include me) and “True Black Metal and a Big Dose of Penetration” (’nuff said), it’s possible the guy is not exactly on-topic with Devil Temptation. But then other Tank Genocide releases Aryan Macht, Nordic Heritage and Fascism is Our Ideal – classics all, to be sure! — take up that slack.
— Friar Wagner

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DEFORMITY, Repulsions of War (1992, demo)

The skull:
At first glance, I thought I had another trepanned skull on my hands, but the cracks around the hole, not to mention the title, strongly suggest it’s a bullet hole. Which is fine. At least he died quick. Of course, had he held out a little longer, he could die even quicker when that swastigrenade goes off. I guess the black outline is supposed to suggest the helmeted soldier who used to carry this skull around, but it kind of looks like Velma from Scooby Doo is trying to hide behind the skull. She’s pretty repulsive, I guess, but not particularly warlike, even if her name is very Germanic sounding.

The music:
This was recorded in 1992 at Sunlight Studios in Stockholm, so you can pretty much already imagine exactly what it sounds like, although in addition to the obvious influence of their countrymen, I hear a not-insignificant amount of Bolt Thrower here as well (particularly on the title track and “In Fear”), which is certainly a welcome addition to the mix. The singer basically splits the difference between LG Petrov and John Liiva, which is to say he sounds pretty bad-ass. Obviously, we at Skull HQ complain tirelessly about unoriginal bands, but the truth is, when it comes to this early Swedish death metal, we’re pretty much always game, no matter how much it sounds like everything else that came out of that scene from 1989 to 1992, and even then, Deformity is exceptionally cool. Better than Desultory for sure. They don’t quite rise to Nirvana 2002 level cult status, but they’re quite good and worth hearing if you like this shit.
— Friar Johnsen

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DEAD MAN’S HAND, Dead Man’s Hand  (2006, demo)

The skull:
Razor…brass knuckles…bullet hole through forehead…fiery noggin. Maybe I’m just getting desensitized to all this, but this is a lame cover. This sort of tattoo-ready Black Label Society-meets-hardcore sort of imagery is BEAT, people. Stop using it. It certainly doesn’t get me excited to hear the music which, after 266 skulls, we can’t expect to be life-changing, can we? Forgive me if I appear cynical…

The music:
Golly…wouldn’t you know it? This is no good. Technically, it’s well-played. There is no sloppiness here. They are very aggressive. They would appeal to people who cannot get enough of Slaughter of the Soul filtered through lazier musicians who don’t care a thing for nuance or subtlety of any kind. It’s like this band thinks Carnal Forge and The Haunted are the BEST BANDS EVER. I love Slaughter of the Soul, but I’m as tired of the endless iterations on that theme as you are, and I cannot take any more watered-down cloning of that sound. So ends one of the most useless entries into the halls of the Big Dumb Skull as there ever was. Goodbye.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL91

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Enemy of the Sun, Caedium (2010, Massacre)

The skull:
This overly smooth skull (grimy textures notwithstanding) was obviously produced with some kind of 3D modelling software, but probably not by the guy who designed the cover, because the sun-insignia set into the skull’s dome is clearly just a slapped-on photoshop addition and not a part of the wireframe model. You can see that it doesn’t follow the contour of the pate at all. Lazy! Same goes for the very cheap-looking effect of the bullet exploding out of the right temple. It seems like this was added rather haphazardly after someone in the band asked, “Yeah, but what does this have to do with caedium?” at which point the artist looked it up and found it meant, more or less, “murder” in Latin. “How’s about, like, I add a bullet coming out of his brain?” Sold!

The music:
Enemy of the Sun is the latest project from guitarist and producer par excellence Waldemar Sorychta, following Grip, Inc. and Despair (among other lesser acts). Sorychta’s guitar style is as distinctive as his production, which makes it very hard to compare him to anyone else. No one else really makes music in the style he does, either, which is thrashy, but not thrash, and decidedly not death metal. He offers a speculative take on what thrash might have become had it evolved consistently in the decades after it’s early 90s commercial and creative death. That said, there’s a blanket of sameness draped over most of what the man has done since Despair that makes it hard to form a strong connection with it. In Grip, there were Lombardo’s drumming and Gus Chamber’s furious yelling to compensate, but none of the other players in Enemy of the Sun rise above the baseline set by the leader (although I do appreciate the diversity of tones employed by frontman Jules Näveri). On Caedium, you get solid, competent, reliable, and ultimately kind of samey songs that work well enough on their own but fail to meaningfully cohere into an album. There’s nothing at all that’s bad about this album or the band, and I’ll definitely check out anything new they produce, but I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to it.
— Friar Johnsen

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MADE OF HATE, Bullet in Your Head (2008, AFM)

The skull:
Welcome, friends, to the album cover motif that never ends. Made of Hate play melodic death metal in the Children of Bodom vein, but this album cover design looks like that popularized by Hatebreed and the like. And we can go back further, sifting through the catalogs of the Victory, Equal Vision and Facebown labels to find more examples of this sort of thing. Very tattoo-y, this particular cover finds a skull comin’ out swingin’, packin’ heat where ears used to be (a bullet hole in the forehead adds insult to injury). Blood spatter forms a background, and the literal interpretation of the album title is duly noted. [Note: the band used to be known as Archeon, whose only album, End of the Weakness, features a skull on the cover that currently resides in BDS’s Honorary Mentions wing. We hail these Poles for their commitment to the skull.]

The music:
Man, from the album artwork right down to the band name itself, these guys are sending all kinds of mixed signals. As noted above, they present themselves as a straight up traditional hardcore band but sound a lot like Children of Bodom, complete with flashy lead guitar work. Were I an enthusiast of modern melodic death metal, I’d be scared away by their imagery. But what about the music itself? It’s more than competent in the area of performance, and well-written enough too. The vocals are scathing in the textbook melo-death mold, the melodies are Iron Maiden on amphetamine, the drums are robotic but with nimble fills…par for the course and as generic as most other bands of this type. They’ll be loved by fans who dig this style and don’t demand any sort of originality.
— Friar Wagner