Tag Archives: red

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MORPHINIST, Believer (Transcendent Bringer of Light) (2013, demo)

The skull:
Father, mother and son alike had no idea what the fuck happened. They walked into Applebee’s for their regular Monday night dinner treat, and, as usual, dad asked for a placemat (and crayons) so the kid wouldn’t get bored waiting for the food to arrive. Then this creepy goth kid comes over and slaps this down on the table. The crayons would not write on its weird parchment-like surface, and the maze little Dylan was supposed to navigate was one of dark impossibility. Confounded and frustrated, he didn’t so much cry as scream a nightmarish, possessed howl…the futility of the maze and the skull beckoning inside it proved way too much for this seven-year-old who hadn’t yet gotten over his fear of Barney the Dinosaur. It’s too bad they’d never go to an Applebee’s again — everyone in the family really liked the apps, especially the grilled chicken wonton tacos.

The music:
From the demo title, both the main and the parenthetical part, you might think this is Christian metal of some kind. But then Morphinist released another demo in 2013 called Disbeliever (Descent Into Endless Darkness), so I guess they’re playing on both sides of the philosophical stream. And it’s not they, but he: Morphinist is a one-man show outta Hamburg – and the dude has been in 10 other bands I swear on a stack of skulls you’ve never heard of before. So, what about the music itself? For one-man black metal, the sound is reasonably full and the music is delivered with above-average ability. When the guitars start getting cosmic, chiming out blurry meteor showers on the higher frets, it’s entrancing. But the hypnosis doesn’t last, and ultimately these two long songs (both 14+ minutes) become so excruciatingly boring that it leads to a kind of impatient aggravation. The main problems isn’t that that the parts are bad (lots of them are legitimately good, no doubt) but it has an empty feeling. Maybe that’s what he’s going for, but really, this is instrumental metal that fails where so much other instrumental metal fails: it is glaringly instrumental. A good instrumental metal band should never let you feel like you’re missing something (vocals)… their music should capture the interest wholly and totally so that you don’t even realize a singer is missing. Canvas Solaris was really good at that. Morphinist, however, is not…yet, man, there are some killer passages in first song “Sleep for the Sleepless, Vanquish Your Cage of Flesh,” which reminds of Morbus Chron’s Sweven both musically and in the images its title conjures. There are some fine parts in the second song too (another long title), but you just wish for something else to fill in the gaps here…squishy Moog synth lines…Arcturus-ish guitar leads…or vocals. Later Morphinist (like, the three albums he released in 2014) features some vocals, so maybe I’ll check that out someday.
— Friar Wagner

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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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SIN OF GOD, Satan Embryo (2010, self-released)

The skull:
I imagine the members of Sin of God kicking down the door of some illustrator’s studio like barbarians, possibly even carrying their guitars for some reason, shouting, “Painter man! We demand a cover! We want a big ass skull, and a big ass snake, and make the whole motherfucker red and evil! NOW!” and then standing there, panting and stinking, while the artist scrambles to throw something together, fearing for his very life. When he sheepishly turns his monitor around after about 27 minutes to present his work, the musicians grunt and the guitarist declares, “It is good,” throws down a pile of hides as payment, and leads his warband out of the studio, stuffing a flash drive with the art into his filthy jerkin.

The music:
Mix up Vader and Morbid Angel with a little Krisiun, and you’ve got Sin of God. Straight-ahead modern death metal like this doesn’t do a lot for me, but Sin of God are definitely better than most of their kind. Their riffing isn’t exactly technical, but it’s very precise, and although they employ an awful lot of blast beats, they do it with some sense of measure and a mix that doesn’t bury the guitars in percussive white noise. The drums are in fact probably programmed, and if they’re not they’re at least sample-replaced, but for some reason, I don’t really mind. Even the vocals are pretty good! It sounds like at least a couple guys are chipping in with growls and grunts, and I wouldn’t say that any of them are particularly noteworthy, but they’re at the same time just what the music calls for, and the Hungarian accents lend an exotic twist to the vocals. I don’t see myself craving this sort of thing much, but if you listen to brutal death metal with any regularity, you should check these guys out. This EP was tacked on as bonus tracks to their debut full length, Limbus (which I haven’t heard), so if you should be so inclined to indulge in Sin of God, that’s probably your best bet.
— Friar Johnsen

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HELSTAR, 30 Years of Hel (2012, AFM)

The skull:
Helstar sure do love this horny skull, but unlike fellow past-their-prime thrashers Nuclear Assault, Helstar at least do us the courtesy of commissioning a fresh rendering of their goofy mascot every time they drop him on a cover. That’s about the only creative favor they do us, though, as every one of these covers is boring a lazy. Here they’ve situated the Helskul in front of the Aztec sun stone and made everything red. And that ancient calendar is given some motion blur, for some reason. The skull looks happy though, probably because he’s still got a job, and in this economy, that’s nothing to shake a stick at.

The music:
As Friar Wagner has documented elsewhere, Helstar are a band with an impressive legacy who are actually still reasonably good, and as he mentioned in his review of Glory of Chaos, they’re a genuinely excellent live band. 30 Years of Hel is the proper live album that ‘Twas the Night of a Helish X-mas wasn’t, and if the setlist isn’t as good (including, as it does, lots of lesser new stuff to go with the greater old stuff), at least the sound is much improved. Well, at least somewhat improved. This isn’t a bootleg-quality recording by any stretch, but it’s not particularly powerful, either. The band is tight as hell and James Rivera sounds as Riverian as ever, which is of course a mixed blessing. For as old as he is, and for as long as he’s been doing this, he’s still in undeniably great shape as a singer, but his tremulous warble, which was only barely tolerable in the 80s, has completely consumed him. The troughs of his vibrato could hold a dozen other singers. But if heavy metal’s own Ethel Merman doesn’t put you off, and you’re looking for a medium-good document of an above average nostalgia act from the 80s, I guess you could do worse than this.
— 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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SCAVANGER, Scavanger (2005, demo)

The skull:
I bet there’s another band out there called Scavenger whose album cover is this exact, blurry, angry, red skull, and when this band stole it, they changed the spelling of the band name to Scavanger (note the extra A) to avoid being caught. So far, they’ve gotten away with it, but how long can they keep running?

The music:
I imagine there are thousands of bands like this in Germany. Basically competent, totally boring trad metal bands knocking out chintsy-sounding demos in their bedrooms. They’re the first of four local openers tacked onto the UDO show. They play Sunday nights at their local bar, to a crowd they know personally to a man (and woman, since the bassist’s mom usually goes to their gigs.) They’re not horrible, but even on the ranked list of “Bands Who Aren’t Horrible,” they fall somewhere in the high 6000s. Weirdly, two of the three songs on their Reverbnation page are from this demo, even though they’ve released two albums since. I’m not about to look further into their discography, but that’s a bad sign right there, as these old tunes (the 2005 demo is their first recording) are not so hot. The newer track sounds more or less the same, although I think those drums are real. Back in the 90s, when I was writing a zine, if I got a demo like this from an American band, I might have ginned up some enthusiasm for them, as they’re at least melodic and more or less able to play, but in 2005? In 2014? Not a chance. AND they’re from Germany, where the bar for this sort of thing really should be higher.
— Friar Johnsen

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BLACK RAINBOWS, Holy Moon  (2013, Heavy Psych Sounds)

The skull:
Could this be the skull world’s equivalent of “mooning”? I mean, they don’t have an ass to work with, so maybe a quick upthrust of the jaw is the way a skull would gesture his mischevious indolence? Perhaps this is what’s being depicted on the cover of the appropriately-titled Holy Moon. Skull-mooning cheered on by occult symbols that give him strength to be such a crazy man as this. It’s hardly as surprising and crass as a full-buttocks mooning, and a skull obviously also lacks a hand with which to do the old Italian chin flick, so just cut him some slack and pretend you’re shocked, okay?

The music:
We’ve had a lot of EPs come through the Skullection recently, and I guess it’s a fair indication that many bands don’t regard EPs with as much importance as their full-lengths. “Oh, that thing with two crappy new songs we left off the album and three shitty-sounding live tracks? I dunno…a skull is fine, I guess.” So, this Italian band play stoner rock/metal, and it’s telling that so many stoner bands choose a big dumb skull to represent their music. There isn’t much thought put into stoner music so why should they exhaust an ounce of precious ambition for the artwork? Black Rainbows have this sound down pat, that’s for sure, and that means it sounds a ton like Kyuss meets Sleep meets Clutch meets Fu Manchu. Good for them, and good for the fans who demand things that fit comfortably into the stoner template the way this does. But since there are a zillion other desert/psych/stoner bands that sound just like this, you’re not missing out on much if you miss out on Black Rainbows. You already know exactly what this EP sounds like without having heard a note. Trust us. Two bonus points for the cover of MC5’s “Black to Comm” — not because it’s an ass-jackingly amazing version, but because at least they didn’t bring yet another version of “Kick Out the Jams” into the world.
— Friar Wagner

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CULTES DES GHOULES, Häxan (2011, Hell’s Headbangers)

The skull:
There are at least four covers for this album (originally released on cassette, naturally, in 2008), and while one of them has two big dumb skulls, this lone entry with but one big dumb skull is, I believe, the Hell’s Headbanger issue. I’m also pretty sure this image is a screen cap of a cellphone pic of a CRT television paused on a VHS copy of some 8mm student horror film called Skull Communion or Chalice of the Skull or whatever, because what else would it be?

The music:
Primitive black metal, reminding me more of Bathory than Darkthrone. The sound is cruddy in the way that makes you think they asked the recording engineer to make it sound worse than it had to, just because that’s the sort of thing these kinds of bands like. Which is to say, this entire affair is one giant pose. But, whatever. Every scene has its own esoteric signifiers of authenticity. I expected this to be a completely amateur one-man-band situation, but it appears there is a four-man ensemble at work here, and truthfully, they’re not terrible players, but this music is so far from interesting to me that I’m struggling to not insult it reflexively, if only because I’m running really short on black metal insults after a year and a half of this blog. Basically, if you can imagine yourself liking a Polish black metal band with a French name and a Swedish album title, then you’ll almost certainly love this shit for reals.
— Friar Johnsen

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NEAL SMITH, Killsmith Two (2011, Kachina)

The skull:
This looks like a circus tent design, more specifically something lugged around by a traveling county fair troupe. You know, the kind of thing worked exclusively by chain-smoking ex-con rednecks  You can see this fearsome image (cough cough) on the tent with a barker at the entrance: “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages, step right up! See the amazingriffic, terrifispendous Neal Smith, banging drums and singing songs of skulls and snakes to give you the shakes! The original rocker, straight from the pits of Hell, sent to thrill and chill, only one dollar bill! Oh, what a shriek! Step right this way folks, step right this way…”

The music:
Had Neal Smith not been part of the original Alice Cooper group, people would laugh this shit off as the lunk-headed cock-rock sleaze that it is. This is terrible. It’s easy to throw the “Spinal Tap” insult toward any bad band playing super-dumb heavy metal or hard rock, but in this case it’s a completely accurate comparison. “Strip Down,” “Legend of Viper Company,” “Evil Voodoo Moon”…every one of these songs is dreck. Check out the video for “Squeeze Like a Python.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO22Ttr_adM
See? Maybe Killsmith One is the masterpiece, I dunno.
— Friar Wagner

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HARTER ATTACK, Human Hell  (1989, Arena)

The skull:
“Smile!” says the artist, and this skull is very happy to oblige. “Gosh, it’s just such a nice day out there!,” beams the skull, “and I’m really happy that Harter Attack chose me, out of the billions of skulls they could have chosen, to grace their album cover! I understand they’re going to be the next Metallica, or Testament, and I, for one, will help them convey a sense of danger by appearing all skully on their cover! Human hell, maybe, but it’s not hell for a skull! Oh heavens, not at all! It’s wonderful! Even those red splotches of blood and the half-assed way the artist is currently rendering my visage couldn’t get me down! Not on a day like today! It’s just so sunny and nice out there! Harter Attack, Harter Attack…yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay Harter Attack!”

The music:
This is the only album released by New Jersey thrash trio Harter Attack. Not-very-cleverly named after guitarist/vocalist Rich Harter, the band were there back in 1986 releasing demos, so they’re not quite the bandwagon-jumping variety you’d see a lot of in 1989. Members of Riot and Nuclear Assault breezed through their ranks at one point, and the N.A. link runs deep: NukeAss drummer Glenn Evans produced this album, released it on his Arena Records label, and co-wrote a couple songs. Even bassist Dan Lilker got in on the fun, co-credited with a song called (I love this) “Nuclear Attack.” What you get on Human Hell is neither top-tier nor totally vanilla thrash metal. It does its job and does it well, very much in the NY/NJ mold, reminiscent of Nuclear Assault, Anthrax and Overkill, although not as distinctive as those. Think more along the lines of Jersey Dogs and Gothic Slam, but better. The playing is solid all the way through, the production punchy and dry, you get a few truly good riffs occasionally, the vocals are…okay, those are vanilla. This is not a long slog at 34 minutes, but after the first few tracks it falls flat, and that’s Harter Attack’s downfall: they lack any real variation. There just aren’t enough interesting melodic or rhythmic moments to spread over the whole album. They carved out their tiny little niche in thrash history and it’s still better than much of the retro-retro-thrash littering the marketplace at the moment, so let’s maybe give one half-hearted cheer for Harter Attack. “Yay.”
— Friar Wagner