Drugs And Hate

Faceless Ones summon me to crypts below
Now I join them I have given him my soul
Down, down further into drugs and hate
Black, black masses, I am doomed, this is my fate

Merry Christmas one and all!*

Electric Wizard seem the perfect band to soundtrack the raging winds, slate grey skies and teeming cold rain that have blighted my day today. I have unchained their 2010 LP Black Masses from the tomb where I keep it, nestled amongst the skulls of my enemies and other items of esocculterotica, out of the way of innocents.

This was the third LP after Electric Wizard’s initial line-up changed but to my tired old ears it is the first one where everything sounds like it had settled down properly and really started to fire**.

Opener and, not quite plural enough to be title track, ‘Black Mass’ is absolutely excellent. It showcases a churning, percussive doom sound, that is simultaneously more in check than the band’s early releases, but also manages to still clutch an element of thrillingly real chaos to its dark heart. If I was looking for a single word to sum it up I’d go for mean; I like that, its what I’m looking for.

‘Venus In Furs’ may share a title and a source with the VU classic, but that’s where it ends. Electric Wizard’s song is about strong evil women, and features a wonderfully sleazy riff and a searing guitar solo that cuts through like a scalpel. Drugs, torture, drug torture, torture drugs … this song has it all, well apart from fluffy bunny-wunnies and sunshine. Just be very careful not to cut yourself on this tune.

Next cut ‘The Nightchild’ features a low, low sleazy grind of a riff set firmly astride a horror story. I rather enjoy the way they just abandon the rhyme scheme on the last verse to shoehorn in the line ‘New bodies, new victims, Drug and murder addicted’, just in case we hadn’t got the point yet.

Like a trolley dash down The Aisle Of Ultimate Evil in your local branch of Maxi-Obsceno-Sin, ‘Patterns Of Evil’ features more witches, virgins, whips, narcotics, crypts and general S&M than most bands manage over an entire career.

I shy away from a whole track-by-track as a matter of principle but every nanosecond of Black Masses upholds, intensifies and evil-ifies the whole. I will just particularly commend the utter lyrical nihilism of ‘Scorpio Curse’ to you which has a tone and pace that Sleep would cherish.

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What sets Electric Wizard and Black Masses apart from most doomers is their focus on hatred and drugs; we aren’t talking about some spacegrass here either, nothing as benign. This is music fuelled by watching far too many dodgy Italian exploitation horror movies whilst alternatively huffing oven cleaner and speed^, which basically became the band’s ongoing aesthetic from this point onwards^*.

I really like the production by Liam Watson and chief Wizard Jus Oborn. They mix everything down low, murky without being annoyingly so and then let certain sonic details swim into view as if half-glimpsed through a graveyard mist, occasionally letting a lightning strike of guitar light up the whole.

The band really are on great form here too, Jus Oborn’s voice is Sabbath-adjacent without ever doing so too slavishly, whilst his guitar playing is really potent. Liz Buckingham’s guitar meshes brilliantly into the musical tangle, adding solidity and depth. Shaun Rutter’s drums and Danazoglou’s bass do exactly what they need to, not a beat more and that is a real gift.

All of which would be irrelevant if Black Masses didn’t have the songs to carry it, I get bored of genre pieces quite quickly, I need songs! Weirdo that I am. Electric Wizard do have the tunes here, they have the dynamics to make the LP flow from the opening riff of ‘Black Mass’ until the last faded curl of the instrumental, drugumental if you will, of ‘Crypt Of Drugula’.

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I have mentioned it before but Electric Wizard have an aesthetic based on all manner of European horror movies, a genre that a late teenage 1537 noted was always good for imperilled female nudity. Black Masses leans into this, umm, hard. I count no fewer than 5 nipples and one lady garden hereabouts, all of which I shall shield your delicate sensibilities from, well mostly so.

1257 Down (further into drugs and hate).

*Just practicing for later in the month.

**I’m simplifying here, bassist Tas Danazoglou was recruited for this LP and it was the only Electric Wizard release he played on, he went on to join the more Satan-ish doom band Friends Of Hell. He plays brilliantly here by the way and is credited with playing ‘necrobass’.

^a combo known as Microwave on the streets.

^*a randomly sampled lyric from ‘Satyr IX’:

And when the night calls
We rise, we kill
Our covens grow in darkness
Nurtured by weed and pills
Rise, rise, legions of hatred
Rise, rise, legions of hatred
Rise, rise, legions of hatred
Rise, rise, legions of hatred!