Review: Stonecutters ‘Eye Of The Skull’
Stonecutters main objective through thick and thin was to live their metal life to the fullest. And, not in the Faster Pussycat lanes or riding on ‘somebody’ like Blackie Lawless just to get fat or lazy on a black leather metal couch. They are comprised of original thrashed-up stoner metal that takes you back to Slayer’s very first album on Metal Blade, Show No Mercy.
This is exactly what founding member Brian Omer did relentlessly for the past three decades with little sign of empathy in his lyrics. Throughout the duration of the past two years though, they flung out ear terrorizer after ear terrorizer with two singles that waxed your ringing lobes back out. Scowlers and The Search For Rest skyrocketed the band up to the metal arena in Valhalla, amongst drinking horns crashing together with such metal, such glory.
Brittle Chains is hustled-up and ready to pound 900 hammers with nails in your head. Driven with force, it hails your horns up high with face-melting speed metal worthy of a devil tongue thrown up in the mix and in between them. Their forthcoming album, Eye Of The Skull has thorns that scorn you all over but is wired up to meet your medical metal needs all-in-one. Their past contains a Kentucky beast-wood tale of copyrighted material that has two different sides to it. However, spinning a web of lies on top of its original verses is only good for catching flies in the end.
Stonecutters are by no means surface-level metal only though. It was destined to be deep and indestructible from day one. Cliff Whitehead and Kevin Redford helped Omer early on to form the round table with drummer, Johnny Wooldridge. By the time their album Christhammer took on the shape of a North American tour, this legendary tour blazed back home with them picking up metal stragglers left and right.
Depraved in Kentucky’s hardcore statehood with their early gravel road bands, namely Human Remains and Crawlspace, Stonecutters bludgeoned their way up from their naysayers and surpassed their enemy promoters’ expectations. Surviving one of their metal pits, and even standing to this day, is surviving a state of emergency. If you come up out of this studded album not needing an ambulance, you’ll be in the same vote as their miraculous fans that they managed to make stern bros with along the way and through every single one of their sludge-to-death full-lengths.
The four band members of the apocalypse are upright, riding steady in front of the supreme court of metal justice…
Out of all the bands they have been compared to, one should be comparing theirs to them. If you want to know who was at the first shows and all of them, it was most definitely the Stonecutters banger, misfitted get-a-long gang. My Own Victim set Omer off in a direction he was meant for, to mold golden guitar hits together using calculated twists of iron at high temperatures. The Sword, High on Fire, Kylesa, Bible of the Devil and Mastadon were seen early on in Stonecutters existence, if not crashed out on Brian Omer’s couch at his old underground record haven-house during these bands’ earliest tour pitstops.
Worms Will Feast is puking so fast that you will puke it back up just as fast again. Melting Moon nearly did the same, but you won’t find Omer crashed out on a cold, lonely rock ‘n’ roll floor much longer. He’s found on this album Til The Last Blood withlavishing double-bass drum licks holding its contents up. This King of Cups album is spilling over with artwork by Tim Lehi to top it all off. Time is only ticking with Eye Of The Skull in an hourglass of crystal-clear combustion made of guttural-pipes exploding out of one rocked scientist’s throat chakra.
The four band members of the apocalypse are upright, riding steady in front of the supreme court of metal justice. Doom has just entered the courtroom with shredded denim so intricately woven with pure, patched heaviness. Compared to their previous album, Carved In Time, Stonecutters are going straight to the source for their latest inspiration in Eye Of The Skull; the Law of Metal.
When pivotal times in metal history saw Motörhead being the gamechanger that came after Cooper and Arthur Brown, if not before, the end game are bands like Stonecutters and the end game to their sixth album is to embrace and follow the flame keepers, past and present, of proto-metal genres. Their latest distortion has a probability of blowing early Def Leopard songs to the ‘wasted’ wayside. Neolithic lead guitar grinders laying the nu-path for the DIY metalheads to have a solid foundation to stand on. When it’s all said and doomed, Stonecutters are byproducts of what true metal was intended to mold into.
Label: Time Is Truth Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Spring ‘The Strutter’ Chase
