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Electric Wizard announce live jam-room album, Black Magic Rituals And Perversions Vol. 1
“It’s like a lost ’70s black metal demo rehearsal session,” say the Dorset doom titans of the straight-to-tape recording captured in their crypt.
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Album review: Electric Wizard – Black Magic Rituals & Perversions Vol. 1
Apocalypse now! British doom legends Electric Wizard provide the soundtrack to the end of the world on self-recorded, direct-to-tape live ritual.
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
Over lockdown, Electric Wizard leader Jus Oborn thought this might finally be the end. Not of the band – everything. “There was a bit where I was like, ‘Yeah, it's happened – Armageddon!” he told Kerrang! a while back. “I was waiting for this since the ’90s!’”
If this was to be it, he wanted the Wizard to have a document of where they were at that point. Two years of touring had drilled their cataclysmic doom into a perfect groove, but with the prospect of never playing live again a genuine consideration, the band headed into their rehearsal crypt in the wilds of the westcountry to play to an audience of nobody, and capture it on tape themselves.
Black Magic Rituals & Perversions Vol. 1 is exactly how you imagine such a document of Electric Wizard to sound. Living up to Jus’ assertion that he always imagined his band to sound like “rats in your face”, the versions captured here frizz with genuine malevolence and dark magic. Dopethrone and traditional misanthropic closer Funeralopolis are, as ever, ultra heavy paeans to oblivion played with the regular violence, but elsewhere some versions feel much more distinct from their album versions.
Here, Black Mass, The Chosen Few and Witchcult Today become far more sinister and threatening, more dark trip than bonged-out jam. Satanic Rites Of Drugula, meanwhile, takes on much more of the sleazy dread of its drug-addled, night-stalking subject. All of it is captured in raw, nasty glory, sending your mind wild imagining the surrounds in which it was recorded. Whatever you think up, it’ll be emphatically Electric Wizard.
Like Motörhead’s raucous No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith, this is more than just sticking a mic in front of a band as they play. It’s the very essence of the Wizard at their full-powered best that amplifies their personality to deafening extremes. Like No Sleep…, were you looking to show someone exactly what its creators were all about, you couldn’t do much better.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Black Sabbath, Sleep, Church Of Misery
Black Magic Rituals & Perversions Vol. 1 is released on December 13 via Spinefarm
