Usurper II: Skeletal Season

This album is far better than it should be.

Stylistically, it's pretty inconsistent. Most of the time it treads doom/death territory with plodding tempos and riffs, and lower register vocals. But Dismal Wings of Terror and Brimstone Fist are largely black thrash with their blast beats and insanely high vocals, and Prowling Death incorporates thrash tempos, riffs, and a shorter, more concise song structure (it's just over three minutes while most other songs on the album range from five to seven minutes).

Lyrically, the album is childish. It's an record about werewolves, graveyards, and the moth man. The cover art is consistent with this: a comic book-ish scene of several men exposing a skeleton in a casket they have presumably dug up in a graveyard while a few jack-o-lanterns shine behind them. Who brings and lights jack-o-lanterns when they disinter a body? As far as themes go, Skeletal Season is like R. L. Stine's Goosebumps paired with doom/death/black/thrash metal.

The production is ok, at best. The distorted guitars are heavy as hell, the clean guitar is passable, and the vocals are excellent. However, the bass is a mess, completely indiscernible, and the drums sound like wet cardboard boxes. The bass drum is so bad that it's hard to tell what drummer Dave Hellstorm is even doing with his feet at any given time.

On top of that, a lot of these performances are not good. The rhythm guitar and vocals are performed well but the guitar solos are a joke, I can't tell if bassist Jon Necromancer is any good because I can't make out anything he's doing, and Mr. Hellstorm's playing sounds extremely suspect. Again, it's hard to tell how much of that is just the terrible drum production failing to adequately capture his performance, but there are enough moments (like 00:30 of Brimstone Fist, where it sounds like Hellstorm completely missed an obvious cymbal crash while the rest of the band got it) that I am confident Hellstorm was, at least at the time of this recording, not a great drummer.

And yet, I love this album. I've been listening to it for over 20 years and I still enjoy it, which I think is a testament to the strength of the material in it, and especially so considering all of its flaws. The songs are heavy, memorable, fun, and varied just enough to keep it interesting but not so much that it feels like a band who hasn't decided what direction they are going.

The vocals are over the top, in the best way possible -- vocalist General Diabolical Slaughter has always reminded me of a metal version of Meatloaf because of his almost theatrical vocal performances. That's a compliment, to be clear -- I think too many metal vocalists yell, growl, or shriek monotonously with no apparent passion for what they're doing, but on this album Mr. Slaughter consistently gives it his all, and over all of those registers to boot. It's very impressive. I also love his arsenal of "heeeeeyyyyy/hey/ooh/ungh/that's what I said"-punctuations.

As I mentioned already, the rhythm guitar is incredibly heavy, and I think any metal enthusiast will agree that a great rhythm guitar is a cornerstone of most great metal albums, so this is also a key factor in what makes Skeletal Season a strong album.

Overall, between the strong performances here and the band's general enthusiasm for what they were doing, I think the strengths make up for the various shortcomings of this record. After 20+ years of enjoying it, I'm confident I will continue to throw it on on many a cold, damp, grey, spooky day.