Friday Full-Length: Electric Wizard, Black Masses
Posted in Bootleg Theater on July 7th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Dorset stoner doom magnates Electric Wizard released Black Masses (review here) on Nov. 1, 2010, through Rise Above Records, and their mere doing so was something of an event. The by-then-already-long-running band had undergone a sea change in 2007’s Witchcult Today (discussed here) that resulted in an emerging new generation of listenership timed well with the beginning of the spread of mobile internet, the explosion of mobile social media, and so on.
And with Black Masses, the UK outfit led by founding guitarist/vocalist Jus Oborn continued to leave behind their sludgier, rawer beginnings in favor of a swirling and dark psychedelic doom rock, Oborn‘s sneering voice calling out to Satan in the opening track “Black Mass,” “Hear me Lucifer/Black mass, black mass/Take me higher, higher/Black mass, black mass,” in a one-man chant that would become a landmark in their career. That song, and this record in combination with the one before it, helped set the stage for the stoner-doom delve into cultism of the heavy ’10s, happening before the ascent of bands like Uncle Acid and Ghost, Monolord, etc., but informing and influencing those and countless other acts along the way. It was a record that wound up being as ‘important’ as it was catchy and listenable, and those things don’t always coincide.
While pushing deeper into the atmosphere of threat and VHS horror and remaining always very, very stoned in sound, Electric Wizard — then comprised of Oborn, guitarist Liz Buckingham (ex-13), bassist Tas Danazoglou (now of Mirror, Friends of Hell, etc.) and drummer Shaun Rutter — offered eight songs across a dank, willfully lo-fi 59-minute 2LP, and brought listeners with them on their journey through various miseries and terrors.
It was also a direct sequel to Witchcult Today in that many of the Black Masses songs spoke directly to the record before, whether it was “Satyr IX” on Black Masses taking up the mantle of “Saturnine,” which closed Witchcult Today, or Black Masses‘ eight-plus-minute noisefest closer “Crypt of Drugula” answering “Satanic Rites of Drugula” from Witchcult Today. Certainly, Electric Wizard had long since been making references to horror flicks and various occult texts all along, but to turn that pastiche inward was a fresh take, and their doing so helped reinforce their own cult following. If you knew, you knew. I interviewed Oborn in 2011 and he had this to say about it:
It’s not always conscious at first, but the references slip themselves in. We’ve create
d a few of our own elements anyway – “Drugula” and stuff like that, and “We Hate You.” It’s easy to become self-referential at this point – we’ve got seven albums for fuck’s sake. Not many bands do that, to a degree. It’s inevitable, possibly. I’ve hopefully created a sort of iconography for Electric Wizard. That’s more important than the band sometimes, than the lineup or the instruments (laughs).
That iconography, the drugs, the murder, the grueling chug of “Night Child” as it turns through another chorus, and Oborn‘s vocal delivery — able to convey melody while still sounding like an embodiment of ‘fuck it’ as a defining life course — there and elsewhere helped to make Black Masses a pivotal outing for Electric Wizard, sealing their place among the UK’s foremost riff purveyors of their generation and setting them out on a years-long cycle of touring and festival appearances. Shit, Jus Oborn curated Roadburn in 2013. It was quite a time to be alive.
To be nasty without sounding nasty in a caustic sense. Yes, Black Masses was still pretty barebones in sound, and that’s something Electric Wizard would continue to foster on 2014’s Time to Die (review here) and 2017’s Wizard Bloody Wizard (review here), but that rawness becomes the world the songs inhabit. It is an atmosphere suited to the material, an aesthetic choice. Instead of going bigger after the success of Witchcult Today as many other acts might’ve done, Electric Wizard dug in, and working with Liam Watson at Toe Rag Studios, conjured a scathing and molten sound. Would “Venus in Furs” have the same effect if its strut and layered-on midsection solo didn’t come across so rough? Maybe, I don’t know. But the point is it works as it is, and with the production as an asset.
Plus, the songs. Whatever else Black Masses is or however one might feel about Electric Wizard generally, the album is a parade of memorable hooks and riffs. The lead cut was already mentioned but it’s worth underscoring “Black Mass” as a brutal earworm. And from “Venus in Furs” through the Mellotron-laced “Night Child,” through “Patterns of Evil” and the slow unfolding of the especially-wretched “Satyr IX” with a procession that would seem to inform Uncle Acid‘s “Valley of the Dolls” a few years later, followed by the speedier churn of “Turn Off Your Mind” and the coming apart of “Scorpio Curse” which declares the world dead and gives over eventually to the drones and noise that hypnotize in “Crypt of Drugula.” It is a full-album linear flow, and it lasts even through the purposefully unpleasant morass — there are drums deep in there, you know — of “Crypt of Drugula” at the finish, individual pieces adding to the whole each in their turn, the band standing over all of it, swaying, probably high.
Black Masses captures the ideal form of what it is. It is defined in part by Witchcult Today in theme and style, but it also demonstrated how to internalize a self-influence and use one’s past work as a springboard for the next thing. If you believe in due, Electric Wizard are due for another full-length with Wizard Bloody Wizard turning six later this year, and it would suit them to drop a record with no notice — thud, there you go — as well as for a stylistic shift like the one that took them to where they were in 2010. I don’t know if that’s possible, or what they’d be going for in their first album of the 2020s, but to be sure, their place waits for them. Perennial demand for fest appearances and other live shows is probably a decent way to fill the interim.
As always, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy.
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Oof. I guess I made it to the end of the week. We got back from Connecticut on Monday morning. Last weekend’s memorial-service-and-wedding one-two punch between Saturday and Sunday certainly kicked my ass, and kind of defined the start of this week still. Tired as shit, in other words. Continuously.
We also had a window put in in the kitchen after doing the floors last week, and so the house was all taken apart and covered in dust and it was blazing hot and all the more overwhelming for that. As if the sensory input from that and a visit with friends on Tuesday wasn’t enough — and for The Pecan especially, it wasn’t — we went to Six Flags, which was just called Great Adventure when I was a kid, on Wednesday, and it was sunny and sweaty and I told The Patient Mrs. that one of the rollercoasters shifted a kidney so that now I have two on the same side, and so on. It was a lot. After a lot. With a lot happening otherwise.
Thus I took a couple lighter days at the start of the week. I said I intended to do so on social media — this week was one of a couple this summer with no camp for the kid, so it was full-on, all-go, all the time — and got a bunch of nice answers from people who probably thought I was taking more of a break than I intended, but honestly, not reviewing anything until Wednesday and doing two or three posts a day for a few days was a break for me in terms of time, and with the July 4 holiday it wasn’t even that unreasonable to do. It’s weird that I feel guilty and anxious about having done it. A federal fucking holiday.
Compulsion.
We’re not in CT this weekend — it took us four and a half hours to get up there last Friday; we just don’t have it in us again at this point — but we’ll be working more on the kitchen with cabinets and maybe installing the sink and so forth. Whatever you’re up to, I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Watch your head, drink all the water, tell someone you love them. Back Monday with more.
FRM.
