Chris “Weird Biker” Krovatin is the author of two young adult novels, Heavy Metal & You and Venomous. He is currently working on multiple new writing projects, as well as new material with his local New York metal band Flaming Tusk. He is a freelance writer for Revolver and generally comes off as a good-natured pain in everyone’s collective ass.
December is the harvest time for metal journalism. That’s when all of us misanthropic black-clad fucks put together our end-of-year lists, going over our entire musical diet for the last 12 months in an attempt to compile a decent final 10. And while it’d be easy to do a best/worst list, I want to take the high ground and not point out a Worst Album list. That’s just petty. (My 10 best of 2011, if you’re wondering, are: All Pigs Must Die, the Black Dahlia Murder, Tombs, Origin, Toxic Holocaust, Ash Pool, Revolting, Vreid, Hate Eternal, and the Atlas Moth.)
Artwork, however, is different. If your album is bad, fine. You know who you are, probably. When it comes to the music, let’s let it die—everyone’s made a Cold Lake in their lives, so let’s be the bigger man about it.* But there’s no excuse for shitty artwork. In fact, if your album sucks, the least you can do is put something really fucking amazing on the cover (for instance, I’ve always been 50-50 on Lair of the Minotaur, but their covers are damn cool). And unlike your music, which we all know sucks, your stupid choice of artwork is fair game for public condemnation. So here are my picks for this year’s Six Best and Worst Album Covers.
The Six Best Album Covers of 2011
1) Book of Black Earth, The Cold Testament Yes. With this cover, Seattle’s death-metal masters found a perfect image to describe their enthralling brand of fuzzy blackened death metal. If this doesn’t become a back patch soon, someone has to die.
2) All Pigs Must Die, God Is War You know what’s great? When your favorite album of the year has hands-down one of the coolest covers of all time. My No. 1 record of 2011, ladies and gentlemen, and it bears this breath-taking cover, courtesy of artist Florian Bertmer. It’s good to be the king.
3) Autopsy, Macabre Eternal This is one of those covers that’s comical to describe: Two zombies carry a giant stone skull towards an almost-completed statue of the Grim Reaper. Best part? That’s pretty much what the album sounds like.
4) Mhorgl, Heresiarch Until recently, I hadn’t heard of Australia’s Mhorgl, but not only is their brand of black thrash totally badass, the cover of their new record is a Miltonian flurry of demons, devils, wraiths, and fallen angels. When you stare into this abyss, it screams, “Charge!”
5) Chthonic, Takasago Army There’s something about a soldier carving a symbol into his forehead with a huge knife that touches me deep inside. The question is, what character is he carving? This album’s about Taiwanese soldiers, who spoke Mandarin Chinese, fighting for the Japanese! Then again, it might just be an inverted cross.
6) Mastodon, The Hunter Here, the Georgian metal titans left the world of over-the-top van-side illustration and had themselves a Communist Party. I mean, come on, how cool is this 3-D multi-jawed beast-creature? And look at the new logo—insane!
The Six Worst Album Covers of 2011
1) Cradle of Filth, Evermore Darkly Do you guys remember the Cradle of Filth I remember? The band that would put bathtubs full of blood and nude women on their albums, who put out the ‘Jesus is a cunt’ shirt? Remember that? So why does this album have a chick on a park bench for its cover?
2) Wayne Static, Pighammer You know what, I love this album title. It has so much potential to inspire a good cover—oh. Oh, you…you just want a picture of you, with scars, in a kimono. Oh, that’s, that’s cool…no, really, it shows a lot of…erm. Well.
3) Decapitated, Carnival Is Forever Yikes. I don’t know where they were trying to go with this cover, but Decapitated really fell short here. It seems like it’s really trying to say something, but…I dunno. It’s like a parody of a nu-metal album cover. Not a fan.
4) Sebastian Bach, Kicking and Screaming You really have to wonder about these hair-metal dudes sometimes. Like, was it the drugs? Was it the weird biker/homegrown sexuality being bred in the ’80s? What happened, once upon a time, that made them possibly think shit like this looks cool?
5) Limp Bizkit, Gold Cobra I like it when album art says something. For instance, when an album features a morbid sigil by Wes Benscoter, it says, “Good times ahead.” When it’s covered with Vince Locke’s unholy zombiescapes, it says, “This is a Cannibal Corpse record.” And, in the instance of Gold Cobra, it says, “Urinate here.”
6) Lou Reed & Metallica, Lulu To be fair, I’ve never heard this album, only the criticism of it, so for all I know the music rules. But man, how much did they pay the beret-wearing Sarah Lawrence sophomore who made this piece of shit? (Answer: Too much.)
*Actually, I have to be a dick about the new Morbid Angel. Sorry guys, big fan of your stuff, but you really shat the bed with the lights on with this new record.
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With their debut album, God Is War (Southern Lord), All Pigs Must Die have tossed a Molotov cocktail into the musical landscape. Though the band includes members of Converge, Bloodhorse, and the Hope Conspiracy, this isn’t just another supergroup, but is rather a distillation of all the things that make metal and hardcore scary. The new record is nine tracks of unstoppable rage that absolutely crushes its extreme-music competitors. Revolver sat down with vocalist Kevin Baker (also of Hope Con) to discuss his intimidating new band.
REVOLVER How did All Pigs Must Die come together?
KEVIN BAKER We’ve been in bands together, or whatever bands we were in have been on the road together, for years now. In 2009, Matt wanted to create a heavy band that embodied everything good about heavy music from an uncompromising standpoint, so we got together, put down five tracks, and recorded them. All on our own, too.
Did you guys set out with a specific sound in mind?
A lot of it was going back to the things that we’ve liked since we were teenagers that have stood the test of time. There’s plenty of shit that you loved at some point that you listen to now, 10 or 15 years later, and think, Holy shit, that’s terrible! We looked at the music that, to this day, still makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up—early Integrity, early Slayer, the first four Bathory records, Samhain, early hardcore bands like Void, Negative Approach, Discharge, the Exploited. These are the bands we really love musically, and we wanted to go in that direction and make something nasty, and to make it for ourselves, and self-finance the whole thing. So going into it, there was definitely a conscious decision of what it was supposed to be like.
The band has a really venomous tone to it but remains huge and powerful—is it hard to find a balance between big and raw?
I can’t speak for the rest of the band in terms of gear and set-up and all that, but as a writer and a lyricist, I wanted to write something that wasn’t happy, but that wasn’t negative for the sake of being negative. It’s not corny. The songs aren’t about raping a corpse. We’re coming from a very negative place about things that happen every day in this world, and we’re trying to make it as dark as possible. We want to fuse all of our influences, but sound like us, not like a cover band. I want people to hear our influences, but not just hear those bands. I want it to be distinct.
What can you do in this band that you can’t do in Hope Conspiracy?
I think the lyrics here are really blunt, and they match the tone of the music really well. The Hope Conspiracy comes from a bit more personal place. I touch on similar issues in both, but lyrically, here I’m much more focused in man’s inhumanity towards man, and the idea of mankind devouring itself and destroying everything around it, the environment, the world.
The title of the album, God Is War, is a pretty blunt and brutal.
Again, we wanted to focus on man’s inhumanity—not that everyone’s a bad person, there’s good and bad in everyone, just that the whole history of mankind is based on cruelty. The title itself actually came from the book Blood Meridian by Cormack McCarthy. One of the characters in the book, the Judge, who represents humanity’s darker side, talks about how war is God, so we flipped it around. We thought it really worked well with our concept behind this band.
How was recording with producer–and Converge guitarist–Kurt Ballou?
We work with Kurt exclusively. He’s the best in the business as far as we’re concerned. For underground, heavy music, you can’t beat Godcity [futureusgalleryStudios] and you can’t beat Kurt. He knows what you’re going for, and he knows how to get you there. He knows what the end result is supposed to be.
With God Is War hot on the heels of your self-titled EP, it seems like you guys are making a strong push to just get music recorded and put it out there.
Everyone has commitments outside of this. We’re doing this because we love to do it. There’s no pressure…we never really intended to sign any record deals with anybody. We just wanted to make this music. The one label we did consider was, of course, Southern Lord, which is why it was cool that they came across the EP and loved it. We never aimed to be a big band. We just wanted to put this music out, play a show here or there when we could. The most important thing with this band is the writing, first and foremost, before playing out. That’s why we started doing this—being able to write on a consistent basis and being able to record on a consistent basis. We love playing out, we really do, but we’d always much rather write and record new music. So we’ll see. Hopefully this time next year, we’ll have another record.
Tell me about the art for both your releases. It’s incredibly striking.
Florian Bertmer did the art. He’s a good friend of ours. We’ve known him for years. We have a circle of people surrounding this band: Kurt’s one of them, and so is Florian. When the time came to do art for the band, we immediately thought to ask him. He has a real talent at creating art that represents actual music, and I think he did that very well with our art. I’ve bought albums based on what they look like before, so I think it’s really important for a band to have artwork and graphics that stand out and also communicate the music. For both of our records, I think he really nailed it. CHRIS KROVATIN
Photo by Greg Anderson
]]>Opener “Death Dealer” starts with a desperate guitar melody, then erupts into an explosion of charging blast beats and vengeful riffs. “Pulverization” and “Sacrosanct” blend into a whirlwind of fury, while the title track changes the pace to create a slow-burning tide of misanthropic bile that pounds the listener wave after wave. “The Blessed Void” is the album’s frenzied peak, with its painful opening feedback giving way to a breakneck hate anthem that Slayer only wish they could write these days. “Third World Genocide” hits like a hammer, and “Extinction Is Ours” brings melodic breakdowns and overconfident guitar leads galore. “Sadistic Vindicator” ties a bow around the whole record, its sorrowful but primal sludginess a perfect conclusion to the previous 30-something minutes of unadulterated hatred.
What makes God Is War an undeniable gem, though, is its complete lack of pretense. Other bands grasp at cred with albums that are overly technical or unlistenably raw; this record’s infectious melodies, straightforward pacing, and crisp production only make it a greater achievement for underground extremity. All Pigs Must Die have nothing to hide. Their message is simple: we are angry. You are next. Be very afraid. CHRIS KROVATIN
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