voila_la_scorie
It’s 1984 and I’m 13 years old. I’ve just come back from the record store where I purchased with a bit of my weekly paper route earnings a cassette by a band called Skull Fist. I’ve only been into heavy metal for a year and a bit but I’m eager to build up my cassette collection with as many bands as possible, and Skull Fist just look like the perfect band to bring home. One very good reason for that is that no one around me has ever heard of them!
I drop the cassette into my stereo and press play. There are some quick lead guitar notes and then the guitar starts rapidly firing off a riff. The bass and drums drop in and a high-pitched male vocal adds a “AH-ah-Aoh!” before the double bass drum goes double time. The album is awesome! Vocals, guitars, bass, and drums. That’s it! The music is speedy, the riffs just keep coming, and the vocals are soaring ridiculously into to troposphere. I want to sing along to “Commit to rock”, and “No false metal” captures my adolescent ears with the bold expletive, “Get the fuck away from me!” I’m still too young though to have a chuckle over “Get Fisted” as I assume the band means that I should enjoy being at their concert or listening to their music.
It’s 2020 and I’ve decided to track down Canadian metal bands in order to show support for my countrymen and women and to see what’s happening in the metal scene these days from a Canuck perspective. One of the bands I discover early on (because their album “Head of the Pack” shows up on three or four lists of Canadian metal bands/albums you have to hear) is Skull Fist. I order their debut album from 2011 and when I receive it, I take it home and put it in my computer, copy it into iTunes and export it to my iPhone. The next day, I stuff the ear buds into the holes of my ears and tap the play arrow on my phone. There are some quick lead guitar notes and then the guitar starts rapidly firing off a riff. The bass and drums drop in and a high-pitched male vocal adds a “ah-AH-aoh!” before the double bass drum goes double time.
No, Skull Fist are not an eighties band but their album sure as heck sounds like it could be, from the speed metal playing style to the ultra-high vocals of Jackie Slaughter. This is a fabulous homage to the eighties metal scene from around 1983-85, when playing fast, hard and heavy with a singer who could shatter light bulbs with his voice was the coolest thing. With Skull Fist, they sound so sincerely committed to keeping the spirit alive that you’ll likely be racking your brain in search of where you have heard a band like this before. I think they sound a lot like early Killer Dwarfs on speed metal!
I’m not certain of when this trend began, but it seems that perhaps sometime in the mid-2000’s bands took up the flag of that classic heavy metal sound and style began popping up, and the trend continues to the present. Skull Fist, along with Cauldron, Striker, and Riot City are just a few representatives from Canada who have been dropping albums over the last dozen years or so, their music capturing the sound of eighties metal at a master level. It is so easy to imagine myself hearing this music for the first time on cassette back when I was just a young teenager.
The only non-positive aspect to this particular record is that because the music stays true and blue to a certain style, there is not much variety. It’s just riding the rocket from start to finish. Nevertheless, favourite tracks there are: Head of the Pack, No False Metal, Like a Fox, and Attack Attack rise only slightly higher than the rest of the album which already rises high. Who am I to disagree with the professional reviewers who give this album much praise? It delivers beautifully!
There’s a tendency for some people to lambast any band that’s not “original” because they are only copycats of past acts. I don’t give a beaver’s anus about that. If I enjoy the music, I’m in! And I’m enjoying this album. Got a problem with that? Then you can get fisted!