As the candle burns, the listener is tranced within seething tectonic thunder, becoming the very result of the album’s initial foreboding chord of psychadelic stoner doom metal. The dense, sonically-charged patterns of destruction are skillfully woven by the very mistress of Jus Oborn Himself, the voluptuous Liz Buckingham. From her stagnant roots in the doom band Sourvein, Buckingham has blossomed to the sweetest and most foul orchid of them all. Bat-tailing off of the last album, Witchcult Today, the theme of vampiric “Drugula” has gone from lurking in Witchcult’s “Satanic Rites of Drugula,” to full-blown overpowering mayhem in Black Masses‘ “Crypt of Drugula,” the album’s final track. Each scalar plane of sound has been rendered to full-density, full-volume, high-grade psychadelia that could transport any solid or shape into the Ether. The directions rendered by Electric Wizard’s overall soundscapes is that of simultaneous descension (in the form of lead-infused riffs and blues-rooted scales) and ascension (cultivating a multi-tentacles sound that interlays vastly different levels of tone, density and expectation, requiring the listener to forage through the layers of distortion to extract the kernal of miss Buckingham’s quietly shredding guitar). As the album title suggests, the listener will fall easy victim to the Wizard’s latest brew, and become blind, drugged and beaten to a pulp of leveling our reality before our eyes. Gadzooks!
-Alex
Pantheon E-Zine 