SkullMaster - VoidWalkers

Portland’s extreme heavy metal group SkullMaster finally drop their full length “Voidwalkers” to pummel fans’ ears with. It’s thick, heavy and very old school ranging between slow, doomy passages and faster, more rhythmic tracks. Keeping true to the ‘Portland weird’ slogan the city is famous for, the tracks can seem a little all over the place at times, and sometimes like two genres sewn together, much like some of the song titles. When one first hears the vocals on ‘Enclosing Hordes’ they may think they’re hearing a form of extreme black metal with the shriek tone, but it fits well with the music which plods along. Not quite the usual heavy metal form listeners are used to, but it makes the music interesting. Tracks like these are certainly doomy and the hissing distortion enhances the atmosphere quite a bit. Other tracks like the following ‘ThieveHarvest’ are faster and more oriented in the traditional heavy metal fashion.

The raw production gives a very live feel to the music, but it isn’t so raw that instruments or vocal sections feel buried or left out. One thing listeners will notice is the drums have a varied tone to them which is unique. Sometimes they have that ‘tapdance’ rapid fire pace on a track like ‘As The Black Sorcerer Commands’ and then more of the percussive thunder on ‘DreadRinger.’ Usually lots of heavy metal bands tend to focus on the guitar and vocals and the drums just support in the background, but SkullMaster seem to make the drums the focus on a lot of tracks as they have more variation in between tracks versus the guitars or even vocals. It’s not to say that the other parts of the music are boring but when comparing tracks like ‘VoidWalker’ and ‘Daikaiju Riot’ the slow, drawn out riffs to open the song, the speeding up towards the middle, and slowing down again to a doom laden pace can be a bit repetitive. The riffs at least are catchy and groove oriented.

“VoidWalkers” has its atmospheric elements too, but they are only used on the closing track ‘Plutonium Rainfall.’ This one is probably the most distorted of all the tracks and it works well for the ‘thunderous’ effect the group tries to bring to the music. They even add in some rain samples at the end, but bits like these could have been added on other tracks to enhance them even more, such as ‘Black Sorcerer…’ Still, the debut is solid with just some thumping, crowd headbanging music that will appeal to anyone who likes groove laden heavy metal with a bit of distorted sound. It may not hit hard like a thrash attack from the 80s, but it has enough punch that even with the slower tracks listeners will not find themselves tired and wanting to skip to the following one.

3 / 5 STARS 

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1. Enclosing Hordes
2. Thieveharvest
3. Voidwalker
4. As The Black Sorcerer Commands
5. Daikaiju Riot
6. Dreadringer
7. Graven Idols
8. Plutonium Rainfall


Self released
Reviewer: Colin McNamara
Aug 17, 2020

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