Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Skulld - "Reinventing Darkness" (DIY co-production, 2020)

Band: Skulld
Title: Reinventing Darkness
Genre: Death Metal with Crust Punk influences
Time: 20.57 min
Release Date: 20th February 2020
Vote: 76/100














In March of 2020, so in full quarantine times, a video about an Italian metalhead covering the Slayer's "Raining Blood", that he dedicated to an old woman owning a famous kiosk in her small town (Bertinoro), became literally viral. I remember I had a lot of fun to watch that very short video! But only in these days I realized that that metalhead effectively plays the guitar in a death metal band. That band is called Skulld (after Skuld, a Norn in the Norse mythology that, along with other two Norns, has the power to decide the fate of the people), a quintet coming from two Italian regions, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, that published so far two releases since their foundation in 2018: a demo and the EP "Reinventing Darkness", both in 2019. Well, I received this last one from a friend of mine running the amazing webzine Blog Thrower (shame that it's on hold since June 2020!), that produced "Reinventing Darkness" in a DIY co-production with other 12 metal and punk labels. They are too much to be all listed but some of them were already featured on these pages such as Italian Extreme Underground, Hecatombe Records, Pirate Crew Records (I met his owner during the Marci su Roma 2 Fest) and SFA Records. This connection with the punk world isn't a case because every member of the Skulld comes just from hardcore punk since, for example, the aforementioned video star, Enrico, plays also in bands like NoWhiteRag, the drummer Teo in the Contrasto while the other guitarplayer, Rappo, is into even in a great black/death metal act of the calibre of Hierophant. And don't forget that we are in presence of a band with fantastic values such as antifascism and antisexism. All this is fukken awesome... but is also "fukken awesome" "Reinventing Darkness" in its entirety? FUCK YEAAAAH!