Skeletal Spectre's Occult Spawned Premonitions Review by Graveyard Gregor

Let me kick off Graveyard Gregor's review with this note he included in his email to me...

One of the things that pisses me off about reviews of female fronted bands (or bands with girls in them) is the inevitability of these comments:
"This girl can growl just as well as any dude.."
"In the primarily male-dominated world of metal, she can hold her own..."
or the worst
"...and she's hot, too."
Fucking annoying.  We should be past that by now.  /end rant"

Luckily, GG avoids all these colloquialisms and writes a kickass review.

When was the last time you heard a really good “plight of the Native Americans” song? Iron Maiden's 'Run To The Hills'? Anthrax's 'Indians'?  Well forget all that, and forget that image of a lonely feather-headdressed chief high on a butte watching the sunset as a single tear rolls down his leathery cheek and there's probably a fucking dreamcatcher in the background and maybe a wolf for good measure.  Get yourself Skeletal Spectre's album 'Occult Spawned Premonitions' and listen to the track called 'Scalped'.  This is a song about the dirty white devil getting hunted down in a swamp by some pissed off red-skins and having his face hacked off and worn as a hat.  No hippie crap here, no 'noble savages', just vengeance, pure and simple. In fact that's a good description for the whole of OSP, except the bit about the dreamcatcher.

Two things (besides the music) sold me on this album.  First, the cover art; I bought this disc purely on the weight of its art, unheard.  Okay, admittedly, I'd heard another project by Vanessa Nocera (vocals) called Wooden Stake so I kinda knew what I was getting myself into... and that was the second selling point.  Vanessa Nocera growls like she's gargling chunks of dead demon babies and I mean that in the best possible way.  I knew that at the very least I'd have her dulcet tones to enjoy even if everything else about the album sucked.

Thankfully it doesn't. 

This should come as no surprise, if you believe the rumors that guitarist “Behold the Pentagram” is none other than Roger “Rogga” Johansson, who is a busy little bäver (that's 'beaver' in Swedish) considering he's also been involved with bands like Bone Gnawer, Demiurg, Ribspreader, Putrevore, and Paganizer.  It makes you wonder who “Haunting the Beyond” might be under that spooky hood.  And also makes you wonder what grisly fate befell original vocalist “Sacrifice the Virgin” from their debut 'Tomb Coven', unless of course he was ALSO Rogga Johansson.  In fact at this point I'm not even entirely sure Vanessa Nocera isn't Rogga Johansson.  Has anyone ever seen them in a room together? I mean not that it would matter since Behold the Pentagram wears a hooded robe, so you couldn't tell if he was really him or someone else. 

Holy fuck, I think I just had an aneurism.

Musically, the Spectre is a hearty blend of chunky death peppered with rich, creamy doom.  It's the kind of shit that makes you want to stomp on corpse faces until head juice squirts out the ear canals.  My personal favorite track off this album is “Sekhmet Prowls the Azure Night”, a brutal ode to the lion-headed Egyptian goddess of badassery.  And the closing track, “Domain of the Fleshless Ones”, is a turgid, clogged blood-gutter that drags you through fetid muck for 10 minutes by the hair and then hacks off your face and wears it as a hat.  Oh look, we've come full circle. 

My disc came with a bonus: a nifty Wooden Stake sticker.  I appreciate the (upside down) cross-promotion, so look for a review of them in the near future...