SKULL499

MORBID YELL, Death Desecration  (2004, demo)

The skull:
Hard to gather exactly what’s happening amidst all the black and white noise, but it looks to this friar like the skull of a man who got lost hiking in a jungle and became ensnared in all manner of flora. The harder he struggled, the tighter the vines, branches and stems pulled, eventually suffocating the guy, whose face was eaten off by a band of rabid wild boars. That’s great news for the boars and Big Dumb Skulls! Crappy for the guy who wandered too far out into the wilderness, but we have it on good faith he was a deadbeat dad that deserved it.

The music:
Word on the street is that in the Spanish city of A Coruna, there existed several morbid-sounding metal bands who took similar names at the very same time. Morbid Commotion and Morbid Conniption, both now long-defunct, left the dudes in this then-unnamed band seriously frustrated. What to call their own brand of morbid metal? “Commotion” and “conniption” were both taken, and Texas band Morbid Scream had long owned that name, so it was decided, rather reluctantly, to just call it Morbid Yell and get on with business. (The recent reactivation of Chile’s Death Yell offers exciting possibilities for a seriously yelly tour package.) This is Morbid Yell’s first demo. The recording gives the music a chilling, distant quality, like it’s being communicated from several feet underground, all of it drenched in reverb while cymbals clang mercilessly in their quest to give headaches to the lot of you. This is fairly standard black/death/thrash — primitive, anguished and ugly, played by two Spanish brutes who probably think Watain are the wimpiest band in existence and that Inquisition have sold out. It’s not great, but not entirely worthless either. One thing’s for sure: this tape would have definitely landed them a deal with Wild Rags if that label was still active.
— Friar Wagner