It can be strange the way you get introduced to a band; when I was younger and not grey of hair, it was a combination of word of mouth, a seriptitiously glued poster, a flyer thrust at you in the queue for a concert, or if the band had some money, an advert in one of the music magazines. Nowadays, it tends to be social media campaigns, online adverts, and the assorted electronic nudges that didn’t exist when I started my musical odyssey in a previous millenium. However, my introduction to Witchskull came care of browsing the Rise Above site, spotting their previous release ‘A Driftwood Cross’, and just taking a punt as Lee Dorian’s label tends to attract solid underground acts. As such, I was more than happy that the near omniscient editor that sits at the heart of Ave Noctum chose me to review their latest release ‘The Serpent Tide’.
Things get off to a suitably strong start with an heaping helping of riffage in ‘Tyrian Dawn’, a song that manages to combine all the Iommi worshipping guitar tone you could want, yet tinged with a dark almost Indie edge, as if Saint Vitus and Placebo had collided in the studio for an unexpected collaboration, the same heavy groove continuing unabated into follow up track ‘Obsidian Eyes’, a Goth tinged title that matches a sound that should have purple and black clad denizens of darkness nodding along to the beat. If this mixing of genres is not for you, well firstly, more fool you, but things get down and doom-laden in ‘Sun Carver’, the dragging tempo of the first half building up into a fist pumping gallop to get pits moving and hair flailing.
An almost groovy beat launches ‘Bornless Hollow’ to get feet stomping before the song performs a volte face, the fuzzed out bass becoming somehow even murkier and leading a breakdown, albeit at a speed that even the most chemically relaxed of listeners could keep up with. These Antipodeans love of the occult comes to the fore with the driving sprint of ‘The Serving Ritual’, the NWOBHN tinged guitar heroics a counterpoint to the slow march of title track ‘The Serpent Tide’, albeit the love of magic and mythology that the name Witchskull implies oozes from every line of the track, vocals delivered in a quivering scream like a invocation to summon dark forces from the beyond. Gloom abounds as the band mount ‘Misery’s Horse’ for a quest into an shadow cursed soundscape, with the album being rounded off by ‘Rune of Thorn’, headbanging beats mixing with a guitar solo that needs one Hi-Tech clad foot to be firmly planted on a front stage monitor before the sound fades slowly away into the musical dusk like a retreating phantom.
Whilst being together for less than a decade, Witchskull have a sound and style that just screams of a tight professionalism, whilst eschewing the excessive polish that can make some bands sound like a product of the studio engineer, rather than the coming together of live musicians. With luck the dark road the band travel will lead them out of Oz and towards Europe and the UK where the cachet of the Rise Above marque should help bring them the attention they deserve.
(8/10 Spenny)
Leave a Reply