The absolute trilogy of speed metal! When i am talking about speed metal, i am not talking about the speed metal Annihilator, Metal Church, Risk were delivering, that was a little bit faster than heavy metal (with some power metal elements) and was a step before transforming to thrash. I am referring to the speed metal, that met an explosion of popularity at the end of the ’90s, like a thrash revival movement, which was not pure thrash, but featured black metal elements, rough and dirty sound, blasphemies, ‘evil’ lyrics and high speed riffing.
Two brothers, Philip and Gustaf von Segebaden, formed the group, initially under the monicker Legion, in 1985. After some years of inactivity and without releasing anything official, they renamed the group to Cranium and decided to put an end to every religion, and mainly to put an end to anything was threatening metal music: disco, pop, grunge, etc!
There were many listeners that described them as parody (and why to blame them? Just check the group members’ nicknames: Grave Raper, Chainsaw Demon, Necro-Nudist), a fact that never stopped Cranium to do what they did. Besides, their serious deeds, two amazing black metal albums, can be found in Dawn, their regular group. By pressing play, be sure that you are going to find EVERY and ALL the clichés of metal, lyrics with rough accent, with humour (that in times become hilarious), small skits and many more goodies, all wrapped in a speed/thrash holocaust.
The group released ‘Speed Metal Satan’ ‘Ep in 1997 and two full length albums, ‘Speed Metal Slaughter’ in 1998 and ‘Speed Metal Sentence’ in 1999. You can easily observe another obsession they had with the acronyms of the album titles (SMS). Every member that participated in the band, through all the years, was master of its instrument, and there is no way you are going to hear of sloppiness or amateurism. While, in their first ‘Ep they seem to totally rip off Sodom and Destruction, they manage to fix this flaw in the next releases, by composing amazing songs always influenced by the teutonic and the American scene. Does anyone have any objection to their masterful and impressive cover artworks? With a suitable sound production, the uplifting and maniac riffing merciless hits you, always in high speed without ever dropping to mid tempo speed.
One of their trademarks is the dual vocals. The first kind of vocals, the basic one, is used to express their ideas (!!), the singer is trying to be more theatrical/expressive and most of the time he ends sounding like an angry Japanese, a thing that may annoy many listeners. The second one, emphasize and always underline the metal principle and consists of on purpose punctuated suffixes of the words, by using high pitch screaming ala Halford, ala Overkill, ala Razor, etc. Initially, you may laugh when you hear it, then you’ll get used to it and at the end you are going to love it! The only negative thing they perform is the use of some effects (explosions, chainsaws), that are extremely in front of the vocals and the instruments, but thank god they don’t use them very often.
We have to admit that Cranium followed the retro-thrash movement from the early days, a fact that removes them from the bunch of group that are spawning from everywhere and serve the retro ‘movement’. In addition, whatever they did, they did it with more charisma than the others, with a big percentage of humour and with deep statements in their lyrics:
That’s right! Satanic!
I am the bass player!
That’s right! Diabolic!
I am the Grave Raper!
Or
Speed metal’s gonna break the wall
Speed metal will be their downfall
Speed metal against your disco
Replace Spice Girls with Michael Kiske!