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Class 6(66)
Skullflower: IIIrd gatekeeper
02/03/09 || Khlysty
Release: 1992
Even though I’m a young ‘un in GD, I’m gonna piss off the Lord and the other dignitaries of this venerable site and change, just this one time, the format of the (un)holiest of the holies in this site: the Class 6(66) Review. Please, before justifiably confining me to the darkest bowels of Purgatory (where, for all eternity I’m gonna be forced to listen to Rihanna or – torture of tortures! – “St. Anger”…), listen to me: I’m not committing this Hubris intentionally, but by necessity. See, as much as I’ve tried to break this fucker down to its component parts, it soon became impossible to do it in a way that could convey the sheer density and heavosity of Skullflower’s “IIIrd Gatekeeper”. All of my initial efforts ended up like this: “guitar noise over repeating bass- and drum-lines”. Which, in a way, is true, dig? But not the whole truth; not by a fucking long shot…
OK, first a little history: “IIIrd Gatekeeper” was recorded during 1990-1991 and released in 1992 by J.K. Broadrick’s HeadDirt label. Skullflower was – and still is – the brainchild of one Matthew Bower, a limey guitarist who believes that the guitar is the perfect instrument for making forays into abstract noise. Nowadays, Bower records solo as Skullflower and the results are interesting, though almost unlistenable, abstractions of feedback, loops and noise; back then, though, Skullflower was a “real” band, with Anthony DiFranco on bass and Stuart Dennison on drums and “vocals” (that’s just screaming in one track…), and they operated within a more formalistic “rock” context. This means that they composed “songs” which could be attributed to a subgenre of “rock”, although the band’s highly improvisational nature turned them into monsters of noisy experimentation. See, those guys’ basic idea of rocking out was to find a riff and have the rhythm section repeat it into oblivion, while Bower added layers and layers of guitar sounds: snippets of melody, scratches, skronks, feedback, guitar loops and any other sound a guitar can produce when it’s distorted to all Hell and further away.
Within this record – newly remastered and made available by those great guys at Crucial Blast, whom you should thank on your knees, because this baby was long deleted and you could find it only on eBay at exorbitant prices… – you’ll find nine compositions. The first thing you’ll notice is that some of the songs’ titles remind you of something; you ain’t mistaken. Seems that the band –in a weird humorous mood- chose for the compositions titles that are either adaptations of older songs’ titles (“Black Rabbit” clearly refers to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”), or titles from other bands’ songs (“Larks Tongues”, anyone? “Godzilla”? Huh?). The second thing you’ll notice is that the compositions do not adhere to a single genre: here you’ll find slow-and-low Sabbathic grooves, Motorik-style rave-ups, forays into prog-rock, even into psychedelia and acid-rock. But, y’know, this is forest-for-the-trees crap: these guys clearly are not into some retro-vibe shit; what they’re REALLY into is a serious reconfiguration of the general idea of what “rock” is.
How they achieve this lofty goal (‘cause they do it)? Well, through a very simple and extremely nasty formula: find a genre that you want to disembowel. Write a riff that – even barely – resembles said genre. Get the bass and the drums to play it. The bass is on full-distortion mode, sounding like a crazed bulldozer on a no-control run. Record the drums as if this will be the last percussive sound that will for ever be heard in the whole Universe (simply put, record them as loud as possible). Get the drums and the bass to play the aforementioned riff again and again and again with as little variation as possible. Done all that? Cool, now we’re rolling. Get the guitarist to play whatever comes into his fuckin’ mind within the context of the riff AND with the sole purpose of fucking the song. Badly. Drones? Feedback? Noise? Scraping and screeching? Guitar squeals? More noise? A bit of the actual riff? Even more noise? All that, and the goddamn kitchen-sink, man! And, as a crowning touch, add the gazillion guitar sounds in the mix in a way that they appear to be the main focus AND the background of the music.
Now, I understand that all this sounds like unadulterated self-indulgent shit. But, see, it’s not. The band fully exploits the different styles it abuses (e.g. listen to the expansive snail-paced noise-scape of “Can You Feel It?” and compare it with the acid-trip-gone-horribly-bad of “Black Rabbit”, the psychosis-inducing “Larks Tongues”, the Motorik-from-Hell “Center Puss”, or “Rotten Sun”, which sounds as if Hawkwind took the wrong kind of drugs; shit, listen to all of them, if you know what’s good for you…) and the diversity makes the record more palatable, without diminishing its power or innovative nature; because, in my opinion, many an aspiring young artist have studied this fucker and got a couple ideas of how to make their sound more interesting and heavy. “Heavy”, said I? Oh, yesssssssss. This shit’s heavier than 90% of all the “heavy” bands of today. The density of the sound contained here is incalculable, the distortion levels are inhuman and the ferocity and ugliness quotient is of a class all its own.
Skullflower was the first real “noise rock” band that I’ve ever listened to (this, in contrast with “noisy rock” bands, like Sonic Youth or Jesus Lizard or the whole coterie of AmRep, and with “noise” like Merzbow or Wolf Eyes), and “IIIrd Gatekeeper” is one exceptional record. It uses the context of “rock” to expand upon and totally fuck with. It’s experimental without being navel-gazing or unlistenable. It’s hypnotically repetitious without being repetitive or boring. It’s noisy without being noisy-for-noise’s-sake. And, it’s heavy as all-fuck. If you’re even in the least interested to find what it’s like to create incredibly, exceptionally creative music, this record will become one of your main points of reference – and reverence…
10 motherfucking noisy bastards out of 10.
- Information
- Released: 1992
- Label: Crucial Blast
- Website: –
- Band
- Stuart Dennison: vocals, drums
- Matthew Bower: guitar
- Anthony Di Franco: bass guitar
- Tracklist
- 01. Can You Feel It?
- 02. Black Rabbit
- 03. Larks Tongues
- 04. Center Puss
- 05. Saturnalia
- 06. Rotten Sun
- 07. Vanadis
- 08. Godzilla
- 09. Spoiler
