Posted in Visual Evidence on November 12th, 2012 by H.P. Taskmaster
This poster was sent my way and it was too badass not to post. Not to mention the show is awesome. If you’re in Seattle, I don’t know what else might be going on Saturday, Nov. 24, but I do know that if anything’s going to knock you out of post-Thanksgiving MSG blues, it’s a gig with Mos Generator, VALIS and Seattle’s own Ancient Warlocks. Start making the excuses to your family now.
It’s the release show for VALIS‘ new album, Minds through Space and Time, and Mos Generator will have their new one, Nomads, on hand as well. Ancient Warlocks play third and so appear at the top of this killer poster, put together by Adam Burke of the band Fellwoods:
Posted in Reviews on November 22nd, 2011 by H.P. Taskmaster
Put to press less than a year after the band played its first show in 2010, the Superwizard 7” is the first official outing for Seattle fuzzsome foursome Ancient Warlocks. The band offer no excuses for their stonerly ways on the self-released Superwizard, instead riffing with Fu Manchu-esque abandon on the two included cuts, “Into the Night” and “Superwizard.” A smattering of demo tracks preceded that one can hear on the band’s ReverbNation page, and the song “Killer’s Moon” – very much in the same vein as the material on Superwizard – is streaming at their Bandcamp site, but the 7” marks a physical debut nonetheless and is limited to 300 copies, hand-silkscreened and numbered with righteous cover art by Eric Pruyn. The music of the band itself is rudimentary in its form enough to match Pruyn’s inked lines, and similarly minded when it comes to lyrics about space wizards and mysterious creatures. The single’s lack of pretense in being anything other than what it is makes up a big part of its charm, but if you’re into familiar riffs and grooves, Ancient Warlocks have plenty of accessibility and appeal for the converted.
That’s not to say the songs don’t have their own personality, just that it’s a personality that you – if you’ve found your way to reading this – already know. The band already knows it as well, and that works much to their credit. Bassist Aaron Krause (also vocals) and guitarists Dan Beloit and Darren Chase provide amply thickened fuzz, with Beloit veering into lead lines throughout the longer “Into the Night.” Krause‘s bass underscores the janga-janga shuffle of that song’s main riff, with drummer Steve Jones keeping the march straightforward on the hi-hat and snare, until after halfway through the song, there’s a slowdown and solo section from Beloit that brings a bluesy side not yet shown. Interestingly, that shift happens at about 2:50, and since Superwizard’s title-track is 2:54 and doesn’t have such a break, you could almost say the structures of the two songs on the single are the same, but with the extra piece added to Side A to bring it to about five minutes. It doesn’t offend, in any case. The release in total is about eight minutes long, so Ancient Warlocks would have to work pretty hard to come off as more redundant than they mean to be in that time, and they don’t.