Philip Montoro, Reader music editor
Big Dumb Skulls This affectionately snarky blog, run by two servants of the fictional Council of the Elders of the Skull who call themselves Friar Wagner and Friar Johnsen, began with a question: “How many metal bands have taken great care to write and record their music, only to slap a big dumb skull on the album cover?” Beginning on January 1, 2013, the friars reviewed 666 releases (and skulls) before the Council granted them a “period of rest” last week. Special thanks to the post on Deranged’s Premonotory Nightmare [sic] for introducing me to the takedown “not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier.”
Joy Merten, assistant music director and host of Into the Void at CHIRP Radio
Panopticon, Kentucky I love playing Kentucky for people and watching their expressions when the bluegrass banjo of the first track transitions to the transcendent black metal of the second, with no warning other than a seconds-long drum fill. Panopticon mastermind A. Lunn uses this exhilarating, unexpected combination of genres to conjure images of the beauty of the Kentucky landscape while condemning the destruction wrought upon it and its people by coal-mining companies. Samples of speech from labor activists and coal miners as well as reworked protest songs heighten the emotional intensity of this masterpiece.
Syrius, Az Ördög Álarcosbálja (“Devil’s Masquerade”) My partner and I just returned from a trip to Europe, and I got to spend some time in Laci Bacsi Lemezboltja, a famous record store in Budapest. It had stacks and stacks of European prog records, and I walked out with a bunch of incredible stuff, including this 1971 LP. Recorded in Australia (despite Syrius’s Hungarian origins), Devil’s Masquerade is on sort of a jazzier, more out-there, early-Jethro Tull wavelength, at least compared to most prog. Now I’m hunting down all the band’s other records on Discogs.
