Black Label Society – Skullage
Eagle Records (4/21/09)
Metal
Skullage is the much-warranted career retrospective for one of metal’s living guitar gods, Zakk Wylde. The set offers up a glimpse of 12 years of recording; from the once-obscure Pride and Glory days (Wylde’s first band which recorded its only album in 1994) all the way through to BLS’s 2006 release Shot to Hell, there’s a little bit of everything on here.
Presented in chronological order, the album is a compendium of riffs, metal anthems and melancholic bliss. It opens with Pride and Glory’s “Machine Gun Man” and immediately shifts gears into “Dead As Yesterday” (off Wylde’s solo offering Book of Shadows, which featured material much different from the usual BLS fair).
It’s a good set, to be sure, though it does seem to lean a little heavily on the later, more popular releases—three songs from The Blessed Hellride (“Doomsday Jesus”, “Stillborn” and “Won’t Find it Here”) and Mafia (“In This River”, “Fire it Up” and “Suicide Messiah”)—and only touches on the oft-overlooked 1919 Eternal (“Bleed for Me”) or the lesser-received Shot to Hell (“New Religion”). Skipped entirely is the acoustic Hangover Music, Vol. 6 and the BLS debut Sonic Brew. However, the acoustic set “Slightly Amped”, recorded back on the Blessed Hellride promotional tour, is on here, and it does feature a killer version of “Spoke in the Wheel” (off the aforementioned Sonic Brew) so… perhaps that was a two-birds-one-stone type of deal.
Skullage is also available with a DVD set, which features a bunch of live footage, a handful of music videos, the aforementioned “Slightly Amped” set, and a half-hour piece with Wylde working out, goofing off, jamming and talking about the inspiration for some of his songs. Of note is an insane version of “Spoke in the Wheel” (which looks like it was recorded on the Mafia tour), the “In This River” video and some fun footage of Wylde messing around with the late Dimebag Darrell (talking about the “In This River” video and inspiration during an interview).
The set, on the whole, is killer, and metal fans really can’t miss with Wylde, but die-hards will miss a couple of things. With what was presented on the accompanying DVD, it would have been easy to omit songs like “Fire it Up” or “Won’t Find it Here” to include stuff like “Battering Ram”, Wylde’s sick version of “America the Beautiful”, his insane cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “I Never Dreamed” or another track off of Book of Shadows for the CD side of things.
Nonetheless, Skullage is a must-have for BLS fans and metal-heads in general.
