Tag Archives: shopped

SKULL149

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KATAKLYSM, Serenity in Fire (2004, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
It’s been a while since the last real Photoshop abomination here at Skull HQ, so this truly abysmal effort is almost a welcome reminder of just how fucking dumb a skull can be. Really, it’s hard to imagine how the snake here could look less like it was actually coiled in and around the skull, which is itself glowing, for some reason, and nearly transparent, for some other reason. The (serene?) fire is terrible, and the crosses (also mysteriously transluscent) look like stone and shouldn’t be burning at all. And of course, the background and general palette are best described as “warm shades of brown.” When all these shitty digital collage covers were coming out in the mid aughts, I guarantee every band that used them thought they were so fucking badass, but I thought, “In ten years, these will all look completely ridiculous.” I was totally right.

The music:
There are some albums on the great list of big dumb skulls that completely intimidate me as they heave into view on the spreadsheet. It’s not because the albums are sure to be terrible; terrible albums are the most fun to review. And it’s not because the albums are so good that adequately capturing their excellence in a 200 word review is paralyzingly daunting; that basically never happens with skull albums. It’s because these discs, which are usually released by one of the bigger metal labels, are so middle of the road, so predictable, so completely as-expected that it’s nearly impossible to muster the energy to even listen to them, let along write about them. Serenity in Fire, it won’t surprise you to read, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Modern Kataklysm (defined as post-Victims of This Fallen World) are not a terrible band by any stretch, but there’s absolutely nothing about them that appeals to me. They sound like pretty much every other legacy death metal band, somewhere in the middle of Morbid Angel, Deicide, and Immolation, with an occasional nod to European melodic death. All these bands have terrible triggered drums and singers trying entirely too hard to sound like evil men. They all abuse the privilege of pinch harmonics and blast for no good reason. But, they all more or less write “songs” in a traditional sense, and for this reason alone I should at least sort of appreciate them, when so many of today’s death metal bands dispense with arrangement altogether in favor of a formless sequence of interchangeable riffs. I don’t, though; I just can’t bring myself to give a shit about Kataklysm and their ilk. They bore me to death, ever and anon. And so, even though I forced myself to listen to this entire fucking album, I just can’t muster the energy to say anything specific about it. It came and it went, leaving nothing in its wake.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL118

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W.A.S.P., Best of the Best (2000, Snapper)

The skull:
While I guess it took a little while to clip together the background collage of old W.A.S.P. albums and royalty-free saw blades, the final product here is still a triumph of laziness and grim boredom. The enormous skull seems to have no greater raison d’être than to provide a whitish background so the logo stands out better, but if nothing else, it would be difficult to fit more skull on this cover. Of course, plopping a translucent skull over a red background means most of your cover will be pink, but hey, we don’t judge here.

The music:
While W.A.S.P. has released about three dozen greatest hits compilations, the definitive, nay quintessential W.A.S.P. best-of is their self-titled debut, which contains about 85% of all the good songs they ever recorded, a fact obviously not lost on the hard working folks at Snapper Records, who saw fit to dedicate a full third of the tracklist on Best of the Best to songs from that album or the band’s debut single. Bear in mind that W.A.S.P. had released eight albums by the time this compilation was issued, two of which are entirely unrepresented here. But while you won’t be hearing any songs from Still Not Black Enough or Kill Fuck Die on Best of the Best, you’ll get two tracks from Helldorado, the band’s worst album (as of 2000), including the flabbergasting “Dirty Balls.” And really, if “9.5.-N.A.S.T.Y.” is to be counted among the best of the best, I shudder to imagine what even the worst of the best would be. Die-hard W.A.S.P. fans will of course want this for the two exclusive songs, including the all-time second best heavy metal cover of Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” The best never sounded so bad.
— Friar Johnsen

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HYPOCRISY, Into the Abyss (2000, Nuclear Blast)

The skull:
A dirty, jawless skull in the crosshairs of some kind of reticle, or possibly trapped in a game of Tempest, either emanating or absorbing some weak-looking lightning bolts, and floating over a background of… some brown junk? Dirty pipes or something? Who knows. A skull this lazy just doesn’t have the energy to explain his environment. He’s like, “Man, what do you want from me? I don’t get a say here. I needed some money quick to take care of some shit, and they’re like, ‘Just go float over there, by the red glow,’ and I’m like, whatever, dudes. When do I get paid?”

The music:
If ever a band deserved such a nondescript cover, it was Hypocrisy in the early 00s. Not that their music was terrible or anything, but the meat-and-potatoes death metal with keyboards thing they were peddling at this time was pretty damned uninspired. They had gotten past the “we’re so fucking evil and brutal” out of their system fairly early, and the style of the slow and odd “Fourth Dimension” (my personal favorite Hypocrisy album) evidently didn’t have any staying power. When they settled into the mid-paced middle of their career, it was clear they didn’t really have any particularly good ideas, so they just went with the death metal trends of the day and played the basketball beat over a dozen interchangeable, trebly, black-metal style riffs played high on the fretboard. That is, when they weren’t striving for some buzzy groove, which mainman Peter Tägtgren’s signature ultra-high-gain production rendered in the least comfortable tones possible. It was never really awful listening to Hypocrisy, but it was rarely any fun.
— Friar Johnsen

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ARCH ENEMY, Doomsday Machine (2005, Century Media)

The skull:
A dusty, aged-looking skull, missing a tooth and looking quite tough, haloed by a biomechanical representation of Arch Enemy’s circle-with-four-protrusions symbol, the whole assemblage floating over the most generic industrial-looking backdrop you can imagine. I interviewed Mike Amott when Stigmata came out, and he vaguely alluded to a secret meaning behind the symbol, a meaning which he vowed to never disclose. I found that fairly annoying, and have never made any further effort to learn if he kept that promise. I always assumed it had something to do with the (then) four members of the band, but of course after Johan Liiva left, the band became a five piece. If there is a meaning to it, it’s almost surely far less clever than Amott imagined, which brings us back to this skull. Is this halo/collar supposed to be the doomsday machine? If so, can it really be considered as such if you need to clamp it on to every person you want to doom? This is not how mad science works. As always with this sort of Photoshop art, the various elements don’t quite look like they inhabit the same space, but the skull itself if pleasingly big and undeniably the focus of the cover.

The music:
I love the first couple Arch Enemy discs to death. They’re exactly the blend of Carcass-style melody and Carnage-style aggression that we all wanted from Mike Ammot, who was mostly just dicking around in Spiritual Beggars at the time. (No slam on Spiritual Beggars, though — as stoner/psych metal goes, they’re about as good as it gets.) But even by the third album, the melody/brutality balance was falling out of whack. When Liiva left and Angela Gossow joined, it felt like the band decided to leverage the appeal of their attractive singer to create the most marketable death metal band possible. It’s not that their albums immediately got bad – they didn’t. But, while Black Earth and Stigmata felt like the heavy albums Ammot really wanted to make, the Gossow albums, pretty much all of them, feel like the heavy albums Ammot is obligated to make. His death metal day job. The confrontational spirit of the earlier albums, a spirit pretty much essential to good death metal, more or less vanished, and the rough edges were mercilessly sanded down. All of the Gossow albums would be better with a melodic singer. They’re no more death metal than, say, Nevermore. In fact, death vocals be damned, on average there’s considerably less aggression on display in these latter-day Arch Enemy albums than in all but the weakest Nevermore discs. So while Doomsday Machine has more than its fair share of killer riffs (the ending of the title track is pretty awesome), and even some very well assembled songs, the vibe is just somehow off. This album just doesn’t rile me up the way Black Earth does, to this day, and Gossow’s over-effected and bland, if serviceable, vocals (say what you will about Liiva, he has an unmistakable voice) utterly fail to sell the evil. The super slick production doesn’t help either. Daniel Erlandsson (always the lesser Erlandsson), can blast in time, sure, but the mix utterly tames these supposedly furious beats. Is it painful to listen to Doomsday Machine? Not at all. Just pointless.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL34

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GOD FORBID, Sickness and Misery (Koch, 2007)

The skull:
“Peekaboo, I see you!” says this cute doe-eyed dome of bone. And it literally is a dome depicted on the cover, as we can’t even see its lower portion. Seems the skull is just escaping the trap of barbed wire laid out behind him. Look out, buddy!

The music:
This thing collects 1998’s Out of Misery and 2000’s Reject the Sickness. God Forbid’s early material seems to lean on the metal side of metalcore, and though they’re hardly lacking in musical talent, I always thought God Forbid were pretty damn generic, even if they’re now credited is being forefathers of “deathcore” or whatever. Since this is a collection of early material and not a proper album, it’s no wonder whoever in charge over at Koch thought “let’s slap a skull on the cover. The kids love that shit.” Uh…next!!!
— Friar Wagner

SKULL33

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RUNEMAGICK / LORD BELIAL, Doomed by Death (2002, Aftermath)

The skull:
Including File > New, this cover could be made in Photoshop in five steps. File > New, gradient fill, paste skull, set layer blending options, insert text. If this took more than 15 minutes to create, it’s because the guy in one of the bands who made it had to download a cracked version of Adobe Creative Suite first. It could only have taken longer if the jawless skull had to be cut out of the cover to the Lunatics Without Skateboards, Inc. album. Which would be awesome.

The music:
I had never heard Runemagick before, and I’m not sure the track I listened to is actually from this split, but it’s the same song at least, and it’s not half bad! A sort of Candlemassy doom with death vocals and some interesting textural clean guitars. Color me surprised! Lord Belial I hadn’t heard since the late 90s, and I definitely didn’t care for them then, although a good friend of mine has a weakness for their debut album, which is pink. Again, I can’t be sure if the track I’ve heard is from this split (there are several versions of the song on YouTube, but none indicate this split as the provenance), and as with Runemagick, I’m pleasantly surprised at how listenable it is. From the cover, I expected this to be the worst sort of shit, but this is pretty well composed, mid-paced black metal, heavy on the atmospherics, with some great riffs and a really good solo. Sure, this sounds like dozens of other Swedish bands, and this style is not exactly in my wheelhouse, but I was hardly in a hurry for it to end. Both tracks are well produced (again, assuming I’m listening to the right ones) and good enough to make me think I should dig a little deeper into these bands’ discographies. The power of the skull works in mysterious ways!
— Friar Johnsen

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FREQUENCY, Compassion Denied (2008, Scarlet)

The skull:
Time was, if you wanted a big dumb skull on your album, you’d have to photograph one, or hire an artist to paint one (or draw one in study hall). For as dubious an aesthetic choice as it was, it was at least a conscious and aforethought decision. Nowadays, you can just email some guy on deviantART and ask for something evil, and he’ll photoshop a bunch of tentacles and tubes to some skull he found on the internet and call it a cover. It’s a shameless state of affairs which The Council has embraced only out of a relentless passion for big dumb skulls, and what is more dumb than mismatched and only barely anti-aliased Photoshop layers?

The music:
Workmanlike modern power metal not unlike Nocturnal Rites’ last few releases. Good singer, hummable hooks, lazy-but-acceptable riffing. Journeyman vocalist Rick Altzi (At Vance, Thunderstone, Masterplan) is the appeal here: a modern Dio disciple in the Russel Allen vein. As with most European power metal, when the singer is doing his thing, the guitarists are coasting on whole notes or undistinguished chugging, but when the singing stops, there are occasional moments of interest from the six (or, more likely, seven) stringers. The production is of the icepick-in-the-eardrums modern variety, all sharp edges and hard limiting, which makes it difficult to listen to the whole album at a go, but it’s probably best enjoyed piecemeal anyway, since all the songs start to sound the same by the end, even if they’re enjoyable on their own.
— Friar Johnsen