Doomier Than Thou: The Wizar’d
When first I laid eyes on The Wizar’d‘s Follow the Wizard EP on the “New in Stock” shelf at Vintage Vinyl down the Parkway, I knew immediately it was a doom record and I knew immediately it was one I needed to own. I bought it solely based on the name, knowing nothing about the Tasmanian band or their sound. Nearly three years later, I have no regrets, especially now that I’ve gotten ahold of a copy of the follow-up full-length (there were a 7″, a live record and another EP in between), Infernal Wizardry (Rusty Axe Records).
Next time you?re sitting around, caking on your mother?s cold cream and PhotoShopping yourself into stock photos of blackened forests, just remember that no matter who you are, The Wizar?d is more underground, more cult and truer than you?ll ever be. Fronted by guitarist/vocalist Ol? Rusty Vintage Wizard Master, these practitioners of the dark riff are emasculatingly heavy, playing raw, Sabbathian purple and black tape-hiss doom and offering no solace or escape in either sound quality or pace. Shades of early Penance creep into some of the guitars, but Infernal Wizardry is excruciatingly slow and paralyzingly grim.
Clean vocals give it a traditional edge like Cirith Ungol on quaaludes, except they?re talking about kicking goth kids? asses and worshipping the Devil. Awesome. And though in the wake of Reverend Bizarre the world has been privy to a whole new generation of retro orthodoxy, there’s little question that The Wizar’d, rather than hopping on an aural trend and riding it to notoriety, are looking to be as underground as possible at all times. Bobby Liebling himself couldn’t ask for much more than that.
