Tag Archives: fire

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KAOS, Kaos Among Us (2003, Oblivion Entertainment)

The skull:
Fashioning a chaos symbol out of swords was an inspired idea, and of course cramming them through a skull was the right thing to do. I like the bonus spiky flails as well; they have no business being there, and that’s what makes them work. But I could have done without the generic background of brown and fire. The whole thing looks like an ad for a Games Workshop product, and though that was pretty cool when Bolt Thrower did it in 1989, whatever metal cred being able to field a 3000 point Chaos Space Marine army might have once established, now you just look like some video game dweeb when you lay on the grimdark too thick.

The music:
When I first started spinning this, I thought it was pretty good modern rethrash, if a bit heavy on the crossover elements. I mean, it’s not awesome, and it’s not original by any stretch, but it’s got the fire and energy of a band who at least believe they’re doing more than recreating the sound of a scene they were too young to have experienced firsthand. But then I looked up the release date and saw that this came out long, long before the current trend for mosh exhumation, and it all started to make sense. In fact, Kaos started turning out demos in 1988, making them an honest-to-god first wave thrash band, even if it took them until the year 2000 to release a proper album. Imagine if Sadus started drifting toward hardcore after Swallowed In Black, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Kaos sounded like circa 2003. Not too shabby! Unlike 99.999% of today’s young thrashers, Kaos obviously have more inspiring source material in their record collections than Exodus, Slayer, and Ride the Lightning. The vocals are like a blown-out holler, none too pleasing, and no one is going to accuse Kaos of breaking new ground on their riffing, but this album was clearly made by lifers who knew what they were doing. As I get older and more jaded, I more on more rely on these gut-level inferences about a band’s intentions, which I know is not rational, but whatever. Kaos aren’t awesome, but better them than Toxik Holocaust.
— Friar Johnsen

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ROCK ROTTEN’S 9MM ASSI ROCK N’ ROLL, Fegefeuer (2007, Cargo)

The skull:
I’m pretty sure Rock Rotten acquired this painting, along with the name of his band and the title of his album, from some vendor at Sturgis. The art was airbrushed on leather, and framed. Mr. Rotten traded five replacement kaiser helmet spikes and a vintage Balls to the Wall backpatch for it. I’m told most of the songs on the album are actually about how much he misses that backpatch, but I can neither confirm nor deny this, as I only know as much German as needed to follow a handful of not-so-good Sodom songs, all of which are about bombs, and none of which are about assis.

The music:
This is just heavied-up AC/DC worship sung in German. So, like an even dumber Böhse Onkelz, basically. It’s weird how Germans will give pretty much any rock band a pass on quality so long as they sound like drunk guys singing into their steins. I personally can’t stand AC/DC, and I think even less of their clones, and drinking songs in all languages are idiotic, so this is pretty much torture for me. I guess if you’ve always thought Airbourne would be better with more umlauts, then be prepared to shake it for Rock Rotten.
— Friar Johnsen

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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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CRACK UP, Heads Will Roll  (1998, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
This is the first skull in the Skullection to sport “cauliflower ear,” a common affliction of wrestlers (real wrestlers, not the Hulk Hogan type entertainers). Overall, this is just the kind of imagery people who wear Affliction gear might have gotten psyched up about before Affliction came along. But wait, look closer: the skull appears to have been impaled within a tightly-clamped circular prison. He is in the process of committing arson and breaking free of his shackles. It’s becoming clear now: this imagery is Crack Up’s commentary on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, their own manifesto of sorts, which also exalts the fall of the bourgeoisie, a fall which will set into motion a glorious new day for the proletariat, that they may loose their chains in revolutionary reconstitution and win back a world that is theirs to gain, the defeat of exchange value and the reclaiming of personal worth. No idea what the naked babes are doing in the background, though. Marx didn’t say anything about that.

The music:
Crack Up are one of these late ’90s German bands who began playing death metal then pretty quickly evolved into what is known by the unfortunate moniker of “death ‘n’ roll.” This is their third album, and it sounds as you’d expect:  fat grooves and tones with a growler grunting along in his best Lemmy-meets-Matti Karki impersonation. It sounds like they’re covering Xysma’s entire Deluxe album without any trace of the perverse attitude and left-field panache that made Xysma so special. It’s not the worst “death ‘n’ roll” ever, and there are even a few riffs that you have to grudgingly admit you were shaking your head and tapping you foot to (“The Assassin”). There are, of course, a number of dumb-ass butt-stompin’ riffs tailor-made for low-IQ metal neanderthals. They cover tunes by Dictators and Turbonegro, too, which probably tells you all you need to know about whether you’re going to like this or not. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess Crack Up was a pretty lame death metal band in its infancy.
— Friar Wagner

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HYPNOSIA, Horror Infernal (2012, I Hate)

The skull:
We’ve seen the wolf skullet before, but here we have a skeleskullet, which is a mighty thing indeed. How he gets a comb through those bony locks is a mystery to all but the skull. The dude sporting it is certainly excited, his mouth ahowl and his eyes aflame. Or maybe he’s just angry that the Rogaine he applied to his dome didn’t maintain his magnificent skelebangs. I guess I’d be pissed, too, if I was in that position, but that shit is probably covered by the national health system in Sweden, so it’s not like he’s out a lot of kronor. And in any case, you still look cool, Hypnosia skull, so buck up!

The music:
It walks like a Brazilian duck and it quacks like a Brazilian duck, but this duck is Swedish. Go figure. Seriously, the band name, the logo, the artwork, and the music all sound like Brazilian retro deaththrash, although maybe this is slightly better produced than you’d expect from something genuinely from South America, especially considering these tunes are mostly early demo tracks. Of course, the music basically sounds German, and I’m especially reminded of mid 90s Sodom, filthy and perverted, but Hypnosia’s riffs are a bit trickier than anything Sodom was slinging at the time. A healthy Sepultura influence surely accounts for that, though. This is really just on the wrong side of the line separating “too raw” from “just raw enough” for me, but anyone with a moderate tolerance for grimy third world thrash would surely find these tunes impeccably engineered. This isn’t bad stuff at all; it just isn’t my speed.
— Friar Johnsen

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KICKHUNTER, Hearts & Bones

The skull:
It’s possible that this cover was constructed in Photoshop, but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look like a photo of a real tattoo, and what a doozy it is. I desperately hope that the guitarist got this tattoo explicitly for his album cover. That would be some real dedication. It’s not quite as good as three guys getting the Exhorder logo tattooed on their arms, but it’s still pretty serious. I especially hope that he did this to surprise his bandmates. He shows up one day at rehearsal, a couple weeks before the band is scheduled to hit the studio, and he dramatically pulls off his leather jacket to reveal his new ink. “Behold! The cover of our debut album!” “But, dude, the album is gonna be called Hearts & Bones. Like, more than one heart,” the singer immediately notes. “God damn it, you’re such a fucking dick. I did this for you fucking guys! Can’t you for once be happy?” “No, man, it’s not like that! It’s cool! But like, don’t you think it would be cooler if you added like another couple hearts or something? There’s still room…” “GOD DAMN IT JIMMY! I’M NOT ADDING MORE HEARTS!” “Jeez, dude, calm down, I’m just saying. I mean, no one asked you to get a fucking tattoo for the band! Like, maybe I was already planning on getting my denim jacket airbrushed with the cover art? Did you ever think of that?” And so on. But, happy ending: they worked it out and made like three or four totally shitty albums together.

The music:
Is there anything worse than new hair metal? At least in the 80s, when such crap was popular, you could imagine some percentage of the assholes engaged in this sort of behavior were doing it cynically to get laid, or were just going with the flow, having no sense of good or bad. But in the 00s? You’d have to fucking love hair metal to make an album sounding like this, which is tantamount to getting a tattoo on your forehead that proclaims, “I have shitty taste in music!” I mean, the skull tattoo already implies as much, but I’m talking about making it explicit. Anyway, I’m not going to be able to make much in the way of concrete comparisons to describe this awful band, because I hate this shit with the energy of a thousand suns, but in broad strokes, Kickhunter falls on the bluesier, less glammy side of the hair metal spectrum. More like Tora Tora than Sleez Beez. Or maybe like Kingdom Come with a much crappier singer. Fuck, I hate myself for even knowing these bands exist, but Kickhunter, they’re trying to SOUND like them. I’m ashamed for them, and sad for the world.
— Friar Johnsen

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DOGBANE, Residual Alcatraz  (2011, Heaven and Hell)

The skull:
Sometimes a skull can’t win. They don’t really have a say in the modeling jobs they get, at least, not at this level, and I’m pretty sure this guy hated every minute he had to pose for this winner of a portrait. He’s likely too macho to appreciate the Apocynum that surround him (they look like lilacs but are toxic, which I guess is why these dudes thought this was a great band name), but it was the tattooing of that lame band name on his forehead, in some sort of last-minute non-logo design, that really got him upset. Then he looked down at the album title and got so hot under the collar he lost his shit (ie. spontaneous combustion): “Residual Alcatraz? What the flying fuck is that supposed to mean???” He was given no answer, was paid his $20, and got outta there, hoping for a gig with Black Label Society next time around.

The music:
Dogbane’s music isn’t much better than their chintzy album cover art, lame band name and super-dumb album title. They sound like Demolition-era Judas Priest meets any given NWOBHM band’s mediocre “comeback” album (there are lots — take your pick)…but clunkier (look no further than the mess of second song, “Born to Die”). I love traditional heavy metal when it’s done right, which usually means the old stuff, before it got old enough to recycle. And it’s this sort of recycling that bands like Dogbane specialize in. I know: good songs are good songs, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be original if you’ve got ’em. Unfortunately Dogbane doesn’t got ’em.
— Friar Wagner

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DISMEMBER, Hate Campaign (2000, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
Although the original cover for this album also featured a big dumb skull, the limited vinyl release on Night of the Vinyl Dead features this finer BDS, although to be fair, neither is especially awesome. They’re both variations on the “skull swathed in flames” motif, which is basically always achieved through Photoshop hackery. Oh, how we would love to see someone build an actual fire around an actual skull! I think the closest we’ve come is the melting wax skull used twice by Oz and featured early in the Skullection. Every burning skull since then has been magic-wanded, feathered, and pasted with malice onto some stock flame texture. Laziness campaign!

The music:
This is the second of Dismember’s, “Sorry! We’re still cool!” albums after their half-hearted effort following Entombed’s ill-considered detour into death rock. To their credit, pretty much all of their post-death-rock albums are better than all of Entombed’s, and Dismember’s sellout album, Massive Killing Capacity is better than Wolverine Blues et al. But at the same time, excepting maybe the very first one, none of Dismember’s albums are total killers. They’re always very good, capturing basically everything you want in the Stockholm DM sound, while still never really rising to the level of “classic.” Others would disagree, I’m sure, and really, I probably sound more down on Dismember than is fair, because they’ve been good more or less their entire career, but there’s a reason they’re always compared to Entombed and not the other way around. And these later albums all admit a certain amount of In Flames or Arch Enemy style melodicism in a way that always sounds a little craven and opportunistic. Dismember might be a first tier Swedish death metal band, but surely the next band below them is the top of the second tier. They hang on by a thread, in other words.
— Friar Johnsen

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HORRIFIER, Grim Fate  (2010, Witches Brew)

The skull:
I’ll let Youtuber 13MATTallica96 do the guest review of this album cover for us: “The album cover the great contract of fear and pain; the blinding hate and fire of war and the cold eery darkness of its aftermath…” That’s perhaps reading a bit much into it, but what he’s essentially saying is this: it conveys the yin yang of any fate that can be considered “grim,” that whatever awaits, you cannot escape. What I see here isn’t war, though, but a forest fire that this humongous skull got caught in, probably while hiking. To the skull’s left the scene abruptly turns to an ocean, but it looks like the skull is right near the shore, so if someone would just yell “Move to your left!! No, YOUR left!!” he might be able to swim or float to safety. Therein lies a maddening quandary, because even if he escapes the fire, skulls can’t swim. The holes formed by the curved zygomatic/temporal bones are likely the most pronounced we’ve ever seen on a skull cover, so kudos to the artist for that. Also, credit to the artist for what is a very well-executed painting. No joke, it’s better than most we see around these parts.

The music:
I think of early Metallica and Razor songs played by Acrophet when listening to Grim Fate. Of course, in 2010 that means it’s hopelessly derivative, but I suppose if this had come out in 1985, I would have bought it, listened to it a few times, kept it around and then in 1990 realized it was was never going to be listened to in favor of other, better thrash albums, and tossed it. How did I know “Exordium/From Beyond the Grave” was going to be their “(Welcome Home) Sanitarium” rip before even hearing it? Probably the slash, which makes it look all progressive and stuff. “Exordium” is actually just an intro that sounds like a rejected idea for Side 1, Song 4-era Metallica (1984, 1986, 1988), and “From Beyond the Grave” is more well-played but entirely unnecessary thrash. Sometimes Horrifier sounds like early Def Leppard, or early Jag Panzer, as on “True Metal Never Rusts!,” which shows the band into trad-metal as much as thrash. Somehow, though, the song reminds me of Krank or another such useless band from 1986. Yeah, here’s another band riding the nostalgia train without offering anything that’s actually of their own.
— Friar Wagner

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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