I’m indulging my rarely indulged taste for thrash in this post — rare, because usually thrash doesn’t taste very good to me, except when it’s as vicious as a starving wolverine. Often, death/thrash qualifies very well, and that’s what we have here. One of these bands (the second one) I’ve been sitting on a while without writing about them, and the other I discovered only yesterday. In my addled mind, they seem to make a natural pairing, even though the songs are separated by decades.

NUM SKULL

Thanks to a tip from NCS supporter Utmu, I learned yesterday that on September 16, 2014, Relapse Records plans to reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital the 1988 debut album of a band named Num Skull. The album’s name is Ritually Abused.

I had never heard of Num Skull. Metal-Archives says they were from Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, and that their last album was released in 1996. The first review of Ritually Abused that I read on MA began this way:

“This record is perfect and then some. A proper score would be 103.” And it continues as follows (written by someone who says he heard the band practicing in a two-car garage when he was 12 or 13 years old and had no idea what was going on): Continue reading »