Loud and clanging, Skeleton’s their first album is gruff metal music with a punk attitude and a flare for the menacing.
This band from Austin, Texas is populated by David Skeleton (guitar), Victor Skeleton (drums and vocals), Cody Combs (bass), and Alex Guzman (guitar). I first listened to this set on a mountain in the Rockies and it fit right in with the granite surroundings. It is hard crushing metal in one hand and a slicing knife in the other.
The songs are short, typically under three minutes, and they are catchy in a ruinous sort of way. Every song is fast and battering with a transparent intention to bludgeon. From “Mark of Death” to “Toad” to “Taste of Blood” and particularly on the eponymous track, there is violence and damage in the vocals and all the other instruments, a general invitation to malefaction. Even in the transitional element “Victory,” which has a slow tempo, there is an insistent echoing threat that matches it perfectly with the rest of the album.
The exception to the short song rule is “Catacombs,” the closer, which clips along for coming up on five minutes. It winds its way around you, easing into your psyche with a quiet start. One minute in, you are hit by a barrage of machine gun fire guitars, followed by laments of the suffering damned. This song wraps it up, but the entire album is filled with foreboding and woe, and feels at times like the musical instantiation of a twisting knife. Absolutely drenched in the personified dark, it is the kind of haunt you want to have. Recommended.
Skeleton is out July 10 from 20 Buck Spin on CD, vinyl, and cassette. It will be streaming and downloadable too, of course, and you catch those versions at Bandcamp, amongst other places.
Band photo by Nark Garcia.
Links.
https://www.facebook.com/Skeleton-1425382974369527
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