When I sat down last night to make my Top 20 of 2010 list, I’d only heard Electric Wizard‘s seventh full-length, Black Masses, one time. And no, the copy I ordered more than a month ago from Rise Above Records still hasn’t shown up; it was the second one I ordered from All That is Heavy that came. Having only given it a once-over, I knew it deserved to be on this list, but in all fairness to every other album I listened to and/or reviewed in the last 12 months, I just couldn’t put it any higher than this. Call it a timing issue.

I’m going to post a full review sometime in the next week or so, but in the several subsequent listens I’ve given Black Masses since the first, it appears to be an evolution of the occultic ideas presented on 2007’s Witchcult Today: plenty of rituals being performed, plenty of ’70s boobage throughout, demons being called upon, and so forth. I’m looking forward to digging into it further, but so far, Jus Oborn‘s vocals on “Venus in Furs,” the bounding riff that leads “Patterns of Evil” and the anthemic chorus of “The Nightchild” all make Black Masses a worthy inclusion on this list.

And yeah, I’m sure that when I think back on 2010, Black Masses will be more prevalent than 20th place in my mind, but without knowing the record better than I do at this point, I’d be insulting the 19 other releases to come by buying into the hype and rating this higher just because it’s Electric Wizard and I’m excited about it. Incidentally, they’ve set a Jan. 18, 2011 release date for the official American issue of the album, so maybe Black Masses‘ll show up on next year’s list as well. In any case, expect much pronouncement of genius to come.

Tags: Dorset, Electric Wizard, Rise Above, Top 20 of 2010, UK

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.