Num Skull

Production: Reasonable representation of a staging area for loud sound, this production captures enough guitar tone to work but skews most sound in favor of the bass representation.

Review: Pounding simple death metal, mostly slow with emphatic thundering muffled-strum blasts, Num Skull come from the old school of American death metal in the repetitive bludgeon of power chords and hardcore drum beats that leaves you with the impression of the vocal phrase behind the riffs and choruses. The little tonal conditioning that does occur is chords slamming home on a tone center.

For this style Num Skull take a moderate approach but emerge with updated views of this genre and music more extreme than most currently-billed "extreme" bands; where most rely on simplicity and downstroke inflection, Num Skull take this to the extreme with distillation of all music into chromatic, atonal textural motion of simple chords, resulting in metal that broadcasts basic angst and celebrates the churning simplicity with which our world destroys -- when it feels that inexorable need. Minimalistic guitar and no vocalizing or demonstrative soloing build the bulldozer ambience of Num Skull further.

In summary, this is an aptly named band; Num(b) Skull might be a result of too much of this. If you can appreciate the basic art of death metal songwriting, this package delivers all that you can appreciate in the old school part of that genre including newer innovations in percussion (offbeat, bass bursts) and vocals (harsher, higher end screams). Battering violence accompanies all of it, especially the degenerative slow passages, and it breathes the life of death metal: grinding of inevitability against denial.