Unsigned: Skull of a Mammoth & 15 Times Dead
Posted in Reviews, Unsigned, Watchlist on August 14th, 2009 by AlexAnother couple of UKMU unsigned reviews for your existential enrichment.
The brutal Skull of a Mammoth:
First impressions are deceptive. Skull of a Mammoth’s name lead me to expect lumbering doom laden metal. The bell chimes followed by eerie keyboards and owl toots of the first track here did nothing to dispel this and even conjured and air of Spinal Tap, or worse Bad News (“Bells don’t go dung, cows go dung!”). Oh dear, I thought, and braced myself for some cheese, only to be swiftly bludgeoned from my lazy reverie by a cannon ball sized chunk of Lamb of God style ferocity.
London’s Skull of a Mammoth are a curious mix. The vocals, and overall approach to stripped down, to the point brutality is resolutely Lamb of God, but these tracks effortlessly skip between Metalcore, Black Metal and Melodic Death.
The burgeoning 15 Times Dead:
With a name like 15 Times Dead, I expected these guys would be another cookie cutter metal/death-core bands, so I was pleasantly surprised when a neatly packaged retro-thrash band tore its way out of the Myspace player.
What seems apparent from the recent revival of this revered sub-genre is that the hardcore elements that helped form the rudiments of this style are well represented (DRI, COC, Anthrax, Nuclear Assault), but the classic metal influence is less well represented (unless you count the endless power metal bands). This is perhaps because the big names on that edge are still going strong – namely Metallica and Megadeth. It’s certainly cool to be punking it up, but could it ever be cool to sound like Metallica when the beast lumbers on through varying levels of purist disrepute? This is perhaps why the labels aren’t clambering to sign up bands like 15 Times Dead.
That’s not to say that 15 Times Dead are a one trick pony. This music is deceptively diverse. The thrash masters are all here (Metallica, Anthrax and Testament seep through in varying levels) but there’s a grounding here in classic rock which is tempered by grunge and alternative flavours.
