Now we get stuff from some weird people and places at Ave Noctum but this is to the best of my knowledge the first time we have received anything from three six-hundred-year-old wizards who from picking up too many bad smoking habits by hanging around stoned hobbits have become addicted to pizza. I’m not sure if this entirely explains their appallingly slow work rate though (one sole album and this EP in six centuries is slacking off a bit even if they do also have to contemplate the universe and send hobbits down the pawn shop with another cheap-ass wedding ring.) It appears that they also have become crime victims: They’ve been ripped off. Y’see these fuzzy stoner cowled ones actually have written some of the greatest rock songs ever but they left them lying around at bong parties and unscrupulous ‘musicians’ walked off with them, ‘commercialised’ them and made millions, which our wizard friends could have spent on more weed and pizza.
Finally running out of weed, or pizza, or both, the Blackwitch Pudding order of wizard’s have decided to release the originals of these songs to at last get some respect and hopefully get Gandalf off their backs about not joining in on that whole Sauron downer thing.
Now I have to admit that I have a niggling block about the first song here ‘Night Of The Blackwitch’ (blame the second hand smoke this download conjured into my player) so I can’t name and shame the thieves, but our wizards turn in a cracking, down-tuned riff monster with vocals that sounds like a forty a day man. For a bunch of wrecked wizards they are a super tight unit with a smoky, dreamy feel. It’s a marvellous start.
Next up we find Rush as the culprits having shamelessly used ‘Working Man’ as the title to cover up the original ‘Toke’n Man’, a sad, hard-working tale of a wizard trying to reach the mystical heights. Then Kiss rolled up and re-worked ‘Gods Of Grungus’ into the commercial anthem ‘God Of Thunder’. Here presented with the three or four hundred year old original, we find it as fresh and stomping as the cover and twice as playful with a guitar sound to die for. They close us with the epic ‘Bong Hits & Lust ‘ which both Joan Baez and Judas Priest released as ‘Diamonds And Rust’, a suitable slow, thoughtful epic to leave us with that again shows what amazing guitar, bass and drum work this triumvirate of toking wizard’s possess
Yes they may have the work ethic of a pissed-up hobbit on its day off, but hopefully it won’t be another six hundred years before they grace us again because besides being huge fun and very funny, this is a master-class of fuzzed out, laid back riffage and groove.
(8.5/10 Gizmo)
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