SKULL HARVEST, Skull Harvest (2001, demo)
The skull:
“How’d the harvest go, pa?”
“Not so good, ma.”
“How many?”
“Just one. Well, part of one.”
“Are we gonna lose the skull farm, pa?”
“‘Fraid so.”
This cover is spectacularly ugly, full of weird pixelated noise and blacks that don’t match. You used to see a lot of this sort of thing in the 90s, when the unqualified dudes tasked with making their band’s album cover first started using computers but didn’t realize that screen and print resolutions were very different. Even so, I’m baffled by the junk surrounding this sad, lonely skull. Did someone just scribble it in MS-Paint? If nothing else, it was nice of the nameless, incompetent designer to paste the skull on top of the logo. That’s dedication to the big dumb skull!
The music:
Metal Archives classifies Skull Harvest as thrash, and maybe they were in 2001, but the only tunes I could find online were from nearly a decade later, and I guess you’d call that stuff death rock, maybe. Occasionally the music veers toward Sabbathy doom, but the bellowing vocals really feel out of place then. Everything about Skull Harvest sounds kind of amateurish, making me think this is the German equivalent of the crappy groove metal you encounter at shitty bars on thursdays here in the States.
— Friar Johnsen