SKELETAL FACES

A sleaze-ridden and unholy salute to gaunt horrors of the early gothic rock and post-punk scenes, NEW SKELETAL FACES are a jolting shot in the arm for death rockers everywhere. From its scratchy, mutant artwork, to its overall atmosphere of morbid, gutter-bound squalor, "Until The Night" is what happens when the spirit of early CHRISTIAN DEATH, ALIEN SEX FIEND, the legendary Batcave club, and Johnny Thunders's withered corpse are hurled into the same, white-hot, obsidian cauldron.

Occasionally chaotic, this short, sharp rampage through nightmare realms is loose-limbed to the point of near-collapse, and yet NEW SKELETAL FACES are so spiky and callous that every song connects like an ornamental dagger to the forehead. "Disexist" is gnarly hard rock with all the gothic trimmings, and a twisted, hysterical vocal from frontman Errol Fritz. It shares its grim, four-to-the-floor aesthetic with Norwegian black metal's midtempo militia, but a ghostly clangor of blood-drained guitars tells a different and more esoteric story. The title track plunders the brittle bombast of THE CURE's primitive early efforts, before nailing it to a pounding, goth metal chassis that hurtles off into the moonlight fog, hell-bent on death. Next, "Ossuary Lust" grinds like an undead SEX PISTOLS, abandoned to the elements and forced to carve an escape route through the ice, using only a spiked wristband and a handful of ugly punk riffs.

As "Until The Night" rumbles menacingly along, its dark grows deeper and darker. "Zeitgeist Suicide" is a blistering diatribe set to scything, B-movie riffs hewn from purest, runaway train rock 'n' roll. "Pagan War" basks in the twisted, frostbitten glow of its FX-laden fog of guitars, and "Enchantment Of My Inner Coldness" is a charred and bloodless exercise in deadpan, post-punk hostility, with existential angst spewing from every corpse paint-caked pore. Fittingly, the big finish gleefully muddies the waters with a vicious cover of BATHORY's "Raise The Dead": a perfect aesthetic match, but one boiled down to its brittle-boned essence.

They look weird, they sound weird, and they will probably give people nightmares. NEW SKELETAL FACES have gate-crashed the haunted house and are setting fire to the furniture, out of their crazed, Canadian minds on cheap vodka and dirty street speed. Metaphorically speaking, of course.