Review & Full Album Stream: Lucifer’s Fall, Tales from the Crypt
[Click play above to stream Lucifer’s Fall’s Tales from the Crypt in its entirety. It’s out Dec. 17 through Sun and Moon Records.]
If you want to get a sense of where Lucifer’s Fall are coming from, you don’t have to look far. They have a song called “(Fuck You) We’re Lucifer’s Fall,” and that basically sums it up. The Adelaide, Australia, five-piece of vocalist Philip “Deceiver” Howlett, guitarists Kieran “The Invocator” Provis and Blake “Heretic” Stephens, bassist Jessica “Cursed Priestess” Erceg and drummer Ben “Unknown and Unnamed” Dodunski, more than live up to that basic ethos, and their sound seems to put it in constant emphasis along with their raw take on traditionalist doom. Their roots lie in acts like Puritan and Rote Mare, and in their five years, they’ve issued two long-players in a 2014 self-titled and 2016’s II: Cursed and Damned (review here), but the impetus for their new Sun and Moon Records collection, Tales from the Crypt, lies in the smattering of singles, demos, one-offs and Bandcamp tracks they’ve issued aside from those records.
There is some overlap, as there would be with demos and live tracks included — “(Fuck You) We’re Lucifer’s Fall” also appeared on the second LP and I’m not sure how they’ll ever be able to release an album without it included; it’s their slogan and calling card — but with rehearsal tracks, studio songs and live cuts, there’s no want of variety between cuts like opener “Trapped in Satan’s Chains” or “Die Witch Die” as the compilation moves from raw to rawer, stripping doom down to its essential components and adding a lethal dose of fuckall in the spirit of the finest black ‘n’ roller primitivists. Doom worship. Metal worship. Tag on partial, “barely rehearsed” and/or live covers of Reverend Bizarre, Exciter and Angel Witch, and you get over an hour of doomly scathe that’s drenched in attitude and unrelenting in its drive, songs like “Dirty Shits Dirty Music” and the rehearsal tape “Damnation” offering little by way of letup in a barebones sensibility that’s as punk as it is metal.
Are there tapes? There should be. Are there patches? Oh yes.
Some of the included material has been previously released — the already-noted salvo of covers that closes out Tales from the Crypt, for example, was on the limited CD-R Cursed Visions – Dungeon Demos III in 2016, which indeed was the third in a series of demos going back to the beginnings of the band in 2013 (though the “Angel Witch” here comes from 2017’s digital offering Live & Raw at Three?-?D Radio’s Sound Lounge). But I think even if you managed to snag one of the 30 CDs or 20 tapes that were pressed up at the time — long gone, of course — you might be fan enough to appreciate their appearance here as well. And if they’re new to you, or if the band is new to you, it’s hard to argue they do anything but shine in these tracks. Since so much of the point in what they do is to strip away what they might consider the excess from traditional doom and metal, their sound is remarkably well suited to the rehearsal-room feel of “Cursed Priestess,” which ends with a “yeah” from Deceiver that’s only appropriate, “Damnation,” “The Mountains of Madness” and this version of “(Fuck You) We’re Lucifer’s Fall.”
By extension, the bootleg-style recordings of “Deceiver,” “Die Witch Die” and “Death of the Mother” capture the band at their outwardly nastiest and thus most righteous. Having heard their proper studio output and the three “cleaner” inclusions here at the outset in “Trapped in Satan’s Chains,” “Dirty Shits” and “Unknown Unnamed,” I wouldn’t necessarily advocate for Lucifer’s Fall to abandon all production in the spirit of ever-more-rudimentary black metal-style tape-hiss cavernousness, but in combination with their actual albums, Tales from the Crypt helps to present a fuller picture of who they are to listeners. And granted, we know who they are — they’re Lucifer’s Fall, and you know the rest — but by culling these varied sources together, not only is more of the band’s personality put on display, which is not a minor consideration when it comes to Lucifer’s Fall, but also they get the chance to feature their work in a kind of anti-greatest-hits portrayal. This too is only fitting the band’s aesthetic. Couldn’t afford the leather, stuck with the denim.
So I guess this is the part where I sat that maybe the 13-track/61-minute assault of drunken doombashing isn’t for everybody. Fine. There’s your disclaimer. And it might be true in terms of the general brashness of the thing, but on another level, Tales from the Crypt embodies some of the best aspects not just of doom, but of being a band. It brims with fist-pumping, headbanging vitality. It taps into the spirit of collaborative creation — five individuals coming together to work toward a singular purpose and expression — and while it’s not by any means a quick listen, the band works quickly in both tempo and craft to bring the listener into their framework, so that as “Unknown Unnamed” gives way to “Deceiver” or “Death of the Mother” leads into the crawling “Cursed Priestess,” the jump in sound is easy enough to make because the whole thing isn’t necessarily about a a full album flow as much as it is about letting the audience into the rehearsal space — one imagines a basement-smelling dungeon, or crypt, or, you know, basement — or into the barroom with the shitty P.A., or just simply into their creative process.
There isn’t much ground being broken here — again, this is mostly material that’s surfaced elsewhere, and even if it wasn’t, that’s not really the point of what Lucifer’s Fall‘s approach. This is a celebration of the most basic tenets of doom and the deviant subculture around it. Call them born too late. Call them consumed with the wickedness of man. Say they’re hurling themselves face-first into the void. However you want to put it, Tales from the Crypt succeeds in bringing to light an essential facet of who Lucifer’s Fall are as a band, and with their penchant for putting out live sets, singles and demos and other sundry whatnot, it’s easy to think that the first such collection won’t by any means be the last. So be it.
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