Tag Archives: side view

SKULL459

Posted on by
Reply

CAULDRON BLACK RAM, Stalagmire (2014, 20 Buck Spin)

The skull:
Let this be a lesson to sleepy skulls everywhere: no matter how tired you are, DO NOT lie down for a nap in a drippy limestone cave. You drift off for a couple decades of well-deserved rest and when you wake up, you’re fucking fossilized to the ground, with nothing to do but wait for some asshat paleontologist to show up and dig you out. And if one of your skull buddies finds you while you’re sleeping, you can be sure when you wake up there’ll be a dick drawn on your dome, in Sharpie no less. You’ll never live that shit down.

The music:
When I started spinning this disc, I was immediately reminded of Meathook Seed’s excellent, underrated debut, Embedded, which was built on weird, slinky riffs, jarring transitions, and a sort of willful inexactitude. No one ever made another album like Embedded, and I’m not saying that Cauldron Black Ram finally have. Nor am I suggesting that Cauldron Black Ram were influenced at all by that one odd Mitch Harris side project, but they have clearly arrived at a similarly strange notion of death metal (minus the keyboards and drum machine, though). Without sounding deliberately old fashioned, Cauldron Black Ram have made an album that evokes the spirit and dare I say curiosity that used to animate at least some small sliver of the death metal scene. Unquantized, only as tight as you can get from rehearsal, and defiantly mid-gain, Stalagmire is death metal freed from the horse-race demands of brutality, speed, and technicality that have nearly ruined the genre in the last decade. If it’s not as good as 2014’s leading contender for death metal album of the year, Morbus Chron’s Sweven, there’s also no shame in that second place finish. Cauldron Black Ram have been around forever, but I’d never heard them before now, and for sure I’ll be working my way backwards to determine when it was they got so good.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL374

Posted on by
Reply

DIABOLI, Kirous  (2004, Northern Heritage)

The skull:
Some sort of Neanderthal skull here, apparently taken by surprise in the seconds prior to his death. I’m guessing death-by-meteor, the way he’s looking to the skies in bewilderment. And wait: does he look like he’s chewing on his own teeth? Or maybe his dental hygiene was that deplorable.

The music:
Either memory fails me, or Diaboli have changed. I remember hearing some of their ’90s era stuff, and it was incredibly primitive, with a bedroom 4-track sort of sound to it. But no, the band’s fourth album, Kirous, sports a thick bottom-end, a tight rhythmic foundation, and a punchy, crisp recording job. Lots of depth and quite heavy, the Celtic Frost-isms are clear throughout, although not as blatant as something like Usurper or Cianide. And indeed, there’s nearly as much early death metal atmosphere here as black metal. It sure as shit doesn’t sound like anything typical of Finnish black metal. I’m impressed, or maybe “surprised” is the better word, because as solid as this is, I still wouldn’t spend money on it.
— Friar Wagner

SKULL353

Posted on by
Reply

HDK, System Overload (2009, Season of Mist)

The skull:
Does the HDK graphic arts team not know how x-rays work? The whole point is to look through the soft tissue (like brains) to see the hard (like skulls). Perhaps we’re seeing a new, experimental kind of imaging technology at work here. Y-rays, or something like that. Or, maybe these are just really dense brains. Like, maybe the system that’s overloaded is the Moh’s Hardness Scale. These brains rate an 11. Also, the soft palate, I guess. Shit. Now my BDS Justification System is starting to smoke. Red alert!

The music:
HDK play modern melodic death metal (think: Soilwork, Scar Symmetry, etc) with a kind of Fear Factory-like precision. They’re not especially original, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t pretty good at what they do. The band is a studio project led by After Forever’s Sander Gomens, and he ropes in a bunch of buddies to help out, particularly in the vocal department. There are at least seven credited vocalists (including: rap vocalis, harsh vocals, clean vocals, and female vocals) and one of the bigger names to turn up is Andre Matos, most famously of Angra. The female singer is Amanda Somerville, who also fronts Trillium and who sounds a lot like all those other Dutch female metal singers. But for the most part, the vocals are a kind of semi-melodic yarl. Not quite thrashy, but definitely not clean either. These alternate with standard issue deep and raspy growls. The glossy, triggered, high-gain production renders the affair a bit more generic sounding than it was already scheduled to be, but if you’re into the bands that HDK wants to sound like, the homogeneity of the sounds will probably comfort. Most of the songs are uptempo and catchy enough, with only a few out-and-out clunkers (notably the lame groove cut “Terrorist”) even if nothing really stands out as especially well-crafted. For modern middle-of-the-road extreme metal, HDK are solid, and if that sounds like a weak endorsement, I should say I’m not too into the bands whose shoulders they’re standing on, but I can certainly appreciate the workmanlike craft they put into their music.
— Friar Johnsen

SKULL342

Posted on by
Reply

THE UGLY, Diggin’ Graves  (2006, demo)

The skull:
This skull was apparently caught diggin’ graves and this is pic # 2 of his mug shot. “Turn to the side, please.” So the skull turns to the side and mocks the officer with an open-mouthed sneer. Asshole.

The music:
Overused Sample #2: “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life…in the gall bladder!” (From 1973’s Flesh for Frankenstein.) Just like that overused “unleash hell” line from Gladiator, it’s a great sample, but has been overused by numerous bands who can’t be bothered to come up with something more original. Of course, sampling itself is borrowing someone else’s work, so how original can you expect them to be? (I’ll answer my own question: Very. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique is a great example.) It should be no surprise, then, that this Swedish band are none too original, musically. It’s super-fast black metal in the vein of countrymen like Marduk, 1349, The Legion, et al., perhaps a bit more bottom-heavy and modern. But only slightly. It’s played very well too, but is incredibly redundant in the final analysis. What’s most interesting about this band is their imagery, not only this demo but their album cover of two years later, Slaves to the Decay. These look like offerings by some punk’n’roll band, or one of those Black Label Society wanna bes. But no, musically it’s seething Satanic speed and screechy vocals all the way. So give ’em a couple points for avoiding being totally stale.
— Friar Wagner