Spin The Skull – Spin The Skull

 

 

Spin The Skull – Spin The Skull
Morbid And Miserable Records / Saturn Eye Records – 2025
Rock, Metal, Punk, 
Rated: ****

I was three beers deep and regretting the fourth when Spin the Skull punched through my speakers like a drunken fistfight in a biker bar. I didn’t see it coming. Morbid and Miserable Records, gotta love ’m, usually cater to the filthy, the smelly and leather-clad fringe: all grease, sleaze, and blackened garage creeps. Not always my scene. Sure, I’m an aficionado of everything heavy, of everything weird, but the stoner, psych and prog side usually suits me better. But like a moth to a flaming oil drum, I keep coming back for whatever Morbid and Miserable Records has to offer, ears wide open. Some sick part of me loves how filthy their records sound. They don’t give a damn what you think. And neither do I, after enough beer and whiskey. But this one, this Spin the Skull monstrosity from Portugal, was different. Definitely not cleaner. And not at all smarter. Not on the other side of everything heavy. But smack dab in the middle of all the beautiful mess. Just... more alive. Like someone crammed a punk band, a doom outfit, and a couple of stray wolves into a speeding muscle car and let the tape roll. It snarls. It sweats. It might have rabies.

The first track Celestial Hole doesn’t introduce itself. It attacks! Feral riffs, knuckle-dragging rhythm, vocals like someone screaming into a beer can from the back of a moving van. There’s swagger, too, not the ironic kind. The real, greasy, blood-under-the-fingernails, punk and destitute kind. This isn’t cosplay. It’s a lifestyle, baby. And then it mutates. Like some drug-resistant strain of rock ‘n’ roll, it won’t sit still. Lost Town hits like a Japanese psych jam being tortured through a broken speaker at double speed. Heat Curse starts like it wandered in from a rockabilly sock hop, then someone threw acid in its face and handed it a copy of Darkthrones’s Under a Funeral Moon. Croaked vocals, doomy interludes, and a full-throttle punk-metal mash-up that made my entire desk shake. I spilled whiskey on my notes and laughed like a hyena that guzzled a bag of bennies! By the end, it’s all gone beautifully off the rails. The closing track Ride In Vain is a stoner-punk hellride through a desert full of empty beer cans and bloody noses. If this album had a smell, it’d be a mix of motor oil, old denim, and sweat. And I’d bottle it. Spin the Skull doesn’t care if you’re into it. It’s not trying to please anyone. That’s what makes it work. It’s messy, loud, unpredictable, and, somehow, kind of brilliant. File this one under: albums that gave me tinnitus and a reason to live.

(Written by JK)

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