Review: Beastmaker – 'Inside The Skull'

BEASTMAKER
'Inside the Skull'
RISE ABOVE RECORDS

Fresno, USA trio Beastmaker waste no time on capitalising on last year's ferocious début album 'Lusus Naturae' with another bludgeoning mix of blues grooves, psychedelic overtones and demonic Sabbath worshipping riffs. 'Inside The Skull' sees the band invoke the tried and tested doom mantra of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”, instead they channel their energy into performance and songwriting quality rather than trying to shake their sound up for no good reason.

As with the last album, the band come out swinging with their opening track, 'Evil One', with it's hammering rhythms and hypnotic grooves. The album follows the same pattern for the most part with tracks such as 'Heaven To Hell', 'Of Gods Creation', 'Give Me A Sign', 'Nature Of The Damned', 'Psychic Visions', 'Inside the Skull', and 'Sick Sick Demon' providing particular highlights. To be honest there isn't really a bad track on the album. It delivers exactly what a stoner/doom metal/occult rock album should – monolithic riffs, heavy grooves, and some horror movie samples thrown in for good measure.

In terms of production, 'Inside The Skull' still enjoys that nice, fuzzy, retro analogue stoner doom atmosphere employed on their début. But is just a little bit more polished this time around. The production on their first outing was pretty sharp so it's no surprise this time round that they've continued to put the effort in there.

The shadows of the bands influences (Black Sabbath, Cathedral, The Zombies, Pentagram, Witchfinder General, Danzig, and Witchcraft) still proudly loom over the band, but this time round the songwriting feels more self-confident and identifiable as Beastmaker in their own right. Despite a strong début and follow-up, they are a band that are still coming to their own, but with such a high caliber song writing right from the start you'll be forgiven from thinking they're already veterans.  

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