SKU: 5219929908

Skullcrusher - Skullcrusher

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Skullcrusher - SkullcrusherNew Vinyl Record Skullcrusher Skullcrusher Picture Disc Skullcrusher is, by all accounts, an exploration of the ways you become yourself when you aren't looking and how that feels once you start paying attention. It's a quiet power; a hushed celebration of the tiny, understated subtleties that culminate into knowing yourself. On her debut EP, songwriter Helen Ballentine offers an airy, intense, and unflinchingly open collection of songs written about

New Vinyl Record - Skullcrusher - Skullcrusher

Picture Disc 

Skullcrusher is, by all accounts, an exploration of the ways you become yourself when you aren't looking - and how that feels once you start paying attention. It's a quiet power; a hushed celebration of the tiny, understated subtleties that culminate into knowing yourself. On her debut EP, songwriter Helen Ballentine offers an airy, intense, and unflinchingly open collection of songs written about - and from - one of life's in-between gray areas, a stretch of uncertainty and unemployment, and the subsequent search for identity. Here, as Skullcrusher, Ballentine grapples with how to communicate her private self to an audience.

Ballentine has been playing music for most of her life - piano from age five, guitar since high school - but her songwriting didn't emerge until later. After moving from her home in upstate New York to Los Angeles to study studio art in college, Ballentine was working full-time at a Los Angeles gallery, poised to continue onto the trajectory of visual art she had been on since she was a teenager. Instead, it didn't feel right, and she quit.Suddenly faced with a peculiar freedom, Ballentine decided, somehow both confidently and tentatively, to seriously pursue music for the first time. While nannying on the side to make ends meet, she wrote "Places/Plans," her first song for Skullcrusher, a little over a year ago. Despite her extensive background in visual arts, Ballentine suddenly found songwriting to be the best avenue for her artistic visions, an easy way for her to organically discover what it as she was trying to say."I was feeling very strongly about my lack of a career path, both insecure and confident at the same time," Ballentine explains. "But there was also a lot of confidence that arose out of that process because I was really able to spend time with myself, and the things I love."In music, as in her visual art practices, Ballentine is drawn to conflicting pieces of a puzzle; how hard and soft meet, and the intersection of certainty and ambiguity. Ballentine would tinker on music in pieces, feeling like she wasn't accomplishing anything day after day, and then suddenly realize she had been assembling songs. That experience felt formative, and the resulting EP, which she worked on alongside producer Noah Weinman, is about what it means to feel like you're not doing anything, but finding immense meaning and depth within that, too.The four dark, dreamy songs on her debut EP were influenced by a strange-but-fitting amalgamation of media consumed in the immediate aftermath of quitting her 9-5. There's Valerie and her Week of Wonders, the Czech new-wave film that went on to inform Skullcrusher's aesthetic. There's Ballentine's love of fantasy and surrealism, her appreciation of the way fantasy novels juxtapose beauty and violence.Ballentine was also fully immersed in the world of Nick Drake, watching and reading anything she could about his songwriting. Another sonic anchor came from ambient electronica, which provided her with a shared vocabulary with her new band. And as Skullcrusher, Ballentine is decisive and immediate with the way she uses a sparse arrangement, fitting minimal sounds together in a way that creates a fuller space.On the opening "Places/Plans," Ballentine sighs, "Come in, the window's open and I'm lying alone," which feels fitting for the entirety of the EP - Ballentine invites the listener into the depths her personal, intense solitude. "I put so much emphasis on this private self, and all of these things that I love that are my own, and as soon as I let someone else into that, it's really hard," Ballentine says. "But I'm also someone who wants to let someone else into that. It's sort of this back-and-forth about wanting to connect to other people but also being a little bit afraid of that."Skullcrusher's understated energy radiates with the atmosphere of waking up to the quiet terror of shapeless, structureless days, but it finds power in eschewing the pressures of careerism and a vapid culture of productivity. Instead, as Skullcrusher, Ballentine has the audacity to be comfortable enough with herself, and to simply accept the unknown as her life.

  • 1Places/Plans
  • 2Trace
  • 3Two Weeks in December
  • 4Day of Show
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SKU: 5219929908

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4.3 ★★★★★
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Miscellaneous Notes
Natrona Heights, US
★★★★★ 5
Beautiful Book!
Format: Hardcover
A beautiful edition of one of my childhood favorites!
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2023
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Shava Nerad
Whiting, US
★★★★★ 5
You can get this online free, but I bought it. Let Fanon turn your brain inside out.
I actually like the idea of supporting a press that is publishing Fanon. When I was growing up with my dad working with the SCLC and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as part of the night security crew for the summer marches, I was probably more aware than most Americans -- certainly most Americans outside of the black community -- of how much permeability there was between the nonviolent SCLC, and the Black Panther movement, for which Fanon was a seed influence. Youth in the SNCC organization, the youth group associated with the SCLC, often went back and forth between SNCC and the Panthers as they developed their activist identity and their ideas of how justice might be achieved. The phrase "by any means necessary" used by the Panthers often scared the bejeezus out of the white community. But when I sat down with my father -- who was an adherent of formal nonviolence -- he handed me Fanon to read, and told me that it was a valid investigation as to whether violence should be considered if nonviolent means were not entertained by the state. To my dad, who was a peaceful but fiercely justice-oriented man (for those of you who know the idiom "fire of Amos" he had it), he considered that without the counterpoint of the Panthers, MLK would never have gotten a hearing in Washington DC. Just the idea that there were revolutionaries in American society looking at American "apartheid" and saying, "We are willing to take care of our own if you separate us. We see our situation as that of a post-colonial slavery society and use the model of African liberation as our model. We are willing to be peaceful if we are given justice in peace, but we do not believe that you are acting in good faith and will use whatever means necessary to see you follow your own promises of justice and see justice for our own people if you will not see that done." That was actually a step down from Fanon. That was actually optimism. But all white Americans heard out of any of that was: "...by any means necessary." They didn't think of how they were creating the circumstances that might precipitate violence. That whites had created a system that instituted violence to keep slaves, and later free blacks, contained and preserve power and privilege for the white majority. It is hard for most Americans to even realize that America -- although we became independent from England -- continued as a colonial nation and economy on our own continent and territory. That all the institutions of the repression and destruction of indigenous and imported-slave cultures that happened "over there" in countries that Europeans colonized far from home, we did at home as a break-away colony, and the Europeans who conquered America never relented, compromised, or acknowledged that colonial reality in the way that the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, and British Empires did in their colonial domains. So Fanon is someone worth reading, not only for Africans, or for African-Americans, but for any American or anyone else in the world who wants to better ponder white privilege in America and how it became so very different from colonial privilege as that faded in Africa, through the lens of this Algerian revolutionary philosopher, who so influenced our Panthers. I remain committed to nonviolence personally, but I understand intensely how MLK and Malcolm balance each other. And how that can actually lead to better peaceful solutions, in a social justice conflict where the status quo has been preserved by judicial and extrajudicial violence by a superior force. This is still relevant in puppet regimes all over the world. In client states of capitalist powers and of Russia and China. In the conflicts surrounding Israel, and the conflicts throughout the Middle East and Central Asia that are often couched in sectarian terms or sectarian vs secular terms. It is vital to understanding countries like Zimbabwe or South Africa, where the dynamics of early black leadership as colonial-wannabes are creating environments of corruption and scandal, and robbing their own people. Everyone should read Fanon. If you can't afford the book here, you can find it online free. This book, and Black Skin, White Masks, both highly recommended. If you don't like Marxist/Socialist politics, try to suspend disbelief a bit. The philosophy, sociology, and psychology is amazing.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2019
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TH
Los Angeles, US
★★★★★ 5
The destruction of racism
Format: Paperback
This is a very open and candid view of racism in the early 19th century
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2026
B
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Benguet Bill
Charlottesville, US
★★★★★ 5
good read
Format: Paperback
classic work on imperialism
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Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2026
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A. Kassahun
Pawtucket, US
★★★★★ 5
Must read book on African colonial sociology and politics
Fanon describes the character of (European) colonialists, the colonised Africans (the "masses" - rural and urban, the elites, the nationalists, the tribalists) wonderfully. The book is wonderfully written - Fanon must have been a good writer. Fanon is a psychiatrist, and worked in Algeria as psychiatrist, but he many have travelled other African countries too. His book shows his deep knowledge of both African and European sociology, psychology and politics. The book is still relevant; his analysis as to what will happen after the liberation of African countries is amazingly valid. He is in a way one of the most important African (though he is born in Latin America) sociologist and political scientist. Fanon's book starts on "violence", he doesn't shy away from prescribing violence in the struggle for liberation. Some find Fanon advocating violence, but that is not the case. He puts in perspective the violence perpetrated by colonists against the resulting reaction that culminates in the violence of the colonised. His clear analysis demystifies the violence that still grips Africa. Unfortunately Fanon seems to put all European in Africa as colonists. Many cases from South Africa show that that should not be the case. But his views may be due to the brutal repression he has to witness and experience in Algeria by the French government and French citizens there.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2010

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