Tag Archives: silhouette

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QUILLS, Quills (2006, Galy)

The skull:
What is that, there behind the skull? A bird? A moth, a Rorschach inkblot? There don’t seem to be a single high-resolution scan of this cover anywhere on the internet, so it’s a bit hard to say what’s happening here. Is the skull sporting long sabre teeth, or are those just tail feathers? Why are his eye sockes glowing? This is a highly mysterious and tediously boring skull at the same time. Any more time spent pondering the dumb enigma of Quills’s cranial mascot is sure to be time wasted.

The music:
I didn’t expect much from Quills until I noticed they were on Galy Records, a label in Montreal with more than a few excellent bands (Martyr, Unexpect, Horfixion, Shades of Dusk, etc). And sure enough, Quills are not the sludgy doom band I expected, but something of a weird mix of Mastodon-style technical stoner metal (if such a thing can be said to exist) and highly controlled grindcore. The vocals are basically hardcore yelling (and are quite bad), but although this entire EP is under 8 minutes, there is still some excellent riffing on display, and the playing manages to sound both tight and ragged at the same time. The nearest comparison I can make would be Sulaco, and that’s probably too obscure to be useful, but suffice it to say, Quills are really not bad at all. Then again, they’ve only produced about 13 minutes of music in nearly ten years, so holding out for their world-changing full length would represent a poor investment of one’s emotional resources.
— Friar Johnsen

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MINECREEP, The London Sessions (2008, demo)

The skull:
I think the logo and the skull were some kind of papercraft art project. Like, the bassist sat hunched over a table with a piece of construction paper and a pair of safety scissors for the entire weekend while the other guys got high and made fun of him, but when he opened that folded piece of paper and revealed a logo and a skull cut neatly out of the middle, they changed their tune right quick. Of course, it would have been better if he hadn’t used light blue paper, so in the end they had to scan it for their demo. And since they were already in the computer, they pasted the silhouette over some orangey-brown background, because deep in their hearts they understood that skulls like earthtones best.

The music:
You wouldn’t think groove metal, Therapy?, and mid-90s Megadeth would work together, and you’d be right, but listening to Minecreep, you might occasionally think that maybe there could be a chance you were wrong. This is a clunky demo with bad singing and an unenviable set of influences, but Minecreep almost make it work, sometimes, because although it’s pretty easy to hear where a lot of these ideas came from, they’re sufficiently warped to end up sounding at least somewhat new. Then again, there are moments of pure groove metal hell, and on top of it all, the miserable yelping vocals, so it’s not like this ever really rises above, but when they band locks in on a cool riff, it suggests at least some possibility. But they’ve had 5 years to make something of that, and so far, this remains the sole offering of Minecreep, so I’m not gonna hold my breath
— Friar Johnsen

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THE ORDER, Son of Armageddon  (2006, Dockyard 1)

The skull:
Stark, but not bleak, this skull looks like the logo for a comic book from Dark Horse or Vertigo: some kind of crime story with a horror twist. It’s hard to tell because of the lack of shading, so maybe this skull is just pictured from a high angle, but I prefer to think he’s just got a very tall brainpan. The band logo is even a little clever: the cutouts in the top of the Rs are silhouettes of guys playing drums and guitar (and not just any guitar: the greatest guitar ever, the Jackson Randy Rhoads Flying V!) It could be that this skull isn’t even human; it looks a bit simian, and perhaps this son of armageggon is a damned dirty ape. But those apes evolved from people (after they blew it up) so the Council is okay with the possibility.

The music:
Crunchy, sorta old fashioned heavy metal that reminds me more than anything of Judas Priest’s Jugulator. To be fair, The Order are not that bad, but they’re based on the same bad idea: namely to take 80s style Priest and update it for the 90s with high gain amps and 40% more attitude. That this was released in the mid 00s makes the offense even more grave. I’m also reminded of some teutonic AOR bands of the past fifteen years that can’t come to grips with the fact that they’re basically making hair metal, no matter how slamming their productions. They turn the distortion up and maybe add a little double bass, but the songs are still stupid ditties about women and rockin’. Again, The Order aren’t quite as cheesy as that, but an awful lot of the riffing is heavy only in the way Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood was heavy. At their best, The Order approach recent Pretty Maids in quality, but without the same bouyant sense of fun. This is the band’s debut, and it appears that their later albums benefit from a bit more levity, even as the music becomes more rocky and less to my taste. And none of those albums feature a big dumb skull, so it really seems that it wasn’t meant to be, for me and The Order.
— Friar Johnsen