While the year is coming to its end and everybody is reading or writing best-of-the-year lists and catching up on what they might have missed, some bands are making their first public steps. Bad timing, some might say, from a PR perspective. Maybe. Sure, the bands might get less attention than if they had timed their release differently, but it could be that they simply don’t care about an elaborate PR plan or that they can’t afford one. Or maybe they want to grow in the best and most natural way possible: by releasing music whenever it is that they manage to do so and by playing shows. Which, I find, is not the worst of plans.
Satanic Witch are a far from being a project of newcomers. People with plenty of experience in underground music stand behind this undertaking, and the album has been released on a label with a long tradition in dark music, Ván Records. The band’s personnel are generated from two countries, Belgium and Switzerland, and primarily from two bands, Wolvennest and E-L-R – both are bands we have covered multiple times here before. Apart from Isabelle Ryser and Selina Muth of E-L-R, and Kirby Michel and John Marx of Wolvennest, Shaun van Calster of Length of Time is also part of the band.
To fans of the projects mentioned above I can say that the six tracks, summing up to a playing time of 48 minutes, feature music that is not completely different from the band members’ other endeavours, but that still has its own character and offers some surprises. What I liked best about 4:44 was the fact that the album’s beginning does in no way suggest what awaits you further down the road.
After a short intro that shares the album’s title, Mirror Hour brings black metal and doom, slow and cold, with throaty, male vocals. The autumnal glow of E-L-R or the satiated sound of Wolvennest are nowhere to be heard. That the album is a different animal becomes even clearer with Kvlt when things get downright creepy. Text played backwards, throbbing riffs, synths sounds and male and female vocals singing in different qualities contribute to a complex, layered soundscape that invites you to listen closer and to listen multiple times to understand what is going on. A touch of the Sisters of Mercy, of industrial and EBM adds completely unexpected sound elements. Taking the form of industrial rock, these sound elements become more prominent on Mirage/Die Hexen, the album’s longest track and the song which represents the soundscapes of 4:44 best. For None has high pitched screams and a bit of scrambled opera singing hidden among the haze of sound, while on the ritualistic So Below bells and whispered lines of text create details.
Black metal, doom and industrial rock, cold, ritualistic and hazy, with male and female vocals. A very good, intriguing start. Let’s see what Satanic Witch will cook up next in their cauldron.
(7/10 Slavica)
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