SKULL600

WEIRD BEAST, Moon-Horn  (2011, self-released)

The skull:
I suppose a beast, in its purest essence, is kinda weird. It’s wild, it’s crazy, it’s nuts…so okay, we’ll call beasts “weird” for the sake of this band’s argument. Are skulls weird? Not really. Every single one of us owns at least one. There have been billions of them through the millennia of time. But is it weird to throw a heat radar detection device at a skull? Sure! And here we have Weird Beast’s weird skull:  a hot head, cold eye sockets, and mild-temperature jaws (and one mild-temperature central incisor). What’s this all have to do with “Moon-Horn”? Fuck if I know.

The music:
These Washingtonians whip up a very Northwest-y sounding racket. Song titles like “Beastery” and “Roast the Goat” are a dead giveaway. It’s like they learned from home state heroes like Melvins and Tad, couldn’t help but be influenced by Pantera (so many victims of those Texan rednecks, just unbelievable) and added (un)healthy doses of Eyehategod and Acid Bath. It’s definitely stoner-y in the sense that it doesn’t sound like it took much imagination to assemble, but there’s a thin thread of uniqueness running through these four songs, especially when it edges into pig-grunt death metal territory. But I said “thin” thread; it’s a bit of a mess at this early stage. If these beasts got truly weird, I mean, really really weird, it would be a lot more fun than this pedestrian sort of beer-drinkin’ lumberjack noise/sludge/rock/metal.
— Friar Wagner