For a soundtrack to the end of the world, there is no band better than Electric Wizard.
As the COVID pandemic took hold in 2020 and lockdown restricted movement to your immediate surrounds, the legendary British doom outfit wondered if they might ever play live again. Out in the wilds of the English Westcountry where singer/guitarist Jus Oborn and guitarist Liz Buckingham live, the band descended into their crypt-like jam space to make a live album like no other. With no audience, and no actual plan to release what they came out with, they recorded themselves into a 16-track tape machine to capture their essence, their malevolence, their heaviness.
“We’d been gigging for two years at that point, around America three times, going to Japan and Australia, and we were sounding pretty good by the end of it,” says Jus. “When the pandemic happened we thought, ‘Fuck it, maybe we’ll never play again.’ So we went into the jam room and played the songs to get them on tape to capture how we were playing at the time.”
ELECTRIC WIZARD
Black Magic Rituals And
Label: Spinefarm Records
VÖ: 13.12.2024
Genre: Metal
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The final product, Black Magic Rituals and Perversions Vol. 1, is as raw and heavy as one would expect from The Wizard.
“It’s raw as fuck,” boasts Jus. “It’s like a lost ’70s black metal demo rehearsal session or something. It’s raw, nasty, screaming in your face. I always promised Electric Wizard was like rats in your face. This is verging on it.”
As anyone who’s experienced them live – headlining stages at Download Festival, or London’s iconic Roundhouse – will know, Wizard gigs are a dark celebration of heaviness and volume and bad vibes. Here, the songs sound like a violent hallucination that takes you into their world. Just as their studio works carry in them a sense of sleazy horror, drug-altered reality and middle-fingered misanthropy, the songs the band tear through here drip with the heavy, sinister vibe of having been caught in the crypt of the wizard.
“It was a more about capturing atmosphere and capturing energy,” says Jus.“I was really excited by the idea of just recording us playing purely live to tape and making it sound as raw as possible, like an old, lost recording. We used shitty mics, crappy old tape machine, put it together as fast as possible and just went for it. No one’s sitting down, no one’s got headphones on, we’re all fucking headbanging, just going for it.”
Opening with the enormous Dopethrone, and taking in signature apocalyptic doom staples like Witchcult Today, Satanic Rites Of Drugula and the ever-destructive Funeralopolis, the set caught on tape here shows how powerful and dominating The Wizard can be. As a band who never quite play the same thing twice, even Just notes that over the years some of these versions have grown more sharp edges and barbs than their studio counterparts.
“Some of the stuff from [2010 album] Black Masses, I was really happy to give it more of an edge,” he says. “And even stuff like …Drugula, I think it’s probably a little bit laid back on the album. It’s really such a creepy song about a creature coming up from the grave, and the live version sounds more spooky.”
Jus says he wanted to capture a feeling like that of Motörhead’s classic No Sleep ‚til Hammersmith, or the sense from KISS’ ALIVE! that you were getting a window into something, a world the band created. It’s also, he says, an opportunity for a band as big and cult-like as The Wizard to bring something from metal’s dirty underbelly into the light, if only for the purposes of freaking out the unprepared.
“It’s kind of more got an underground feel to it,” says Jus. “We’ve always been trying to drag in the underground into the overground, rather than pretending to be playing some big stadium, arena show.”
Indeed, what you have here is Electric Wizard red in tooth and claw. There’s no overdubs, no cheating, no putting things through the computer to neaten up afterwards, just a band conjuring up their black magic and capturing it as directly as possible, to the point where you can feel it in your speakers.
“I think that’s what’s going wrong with modern music, you know. For all the benefit of copying and pasting and computer stuff, you’re losing something, probably the most important thing of all, which is why people even listen to rock music, which is to listen to a band, listen to the energy between the musicians and how the instruments are locked together, and how that sounds fucking great.”
A soundtrack to the end of the world? Come this way, my fanatics. The Wizard awaits…
Black Magic Rituals and Perversions Vol. 1 tracklisting
1. Dopethrone
2. Incense For The Damned
3. Black Mass
4. Witchcult Today
5. Satanic Rites Of Drugula
6. Scorpio Curse
7. The Chosen Few
8. Funeralopolis
LINE-UP:
ELECTRIC WIZARD is:
Jus Oborn – guitar / vocals
Liz Buckingham – guitar
Simon Poole – drums
Clayton Burgess – bass
