Singer/guitarist Magnus Pelander approached Witchcraft with a documentarian’s eye from the beginning. “Witchcraft” is the primary music on Witchcraft by the band Witchcraft, with Pelander drawing the listener’s consideration with a easy invocation through the intro: “Witchcraft, take one.” Like every little thing else on the album, the choice to depart this dialogue snippet in as a symbolic territorial marker was a deliberate and intentional act. However it’s additionally fascinating to chart how radically Witchcraft have advanced since their inception, with six subsequent full-lengths that includes six totally different lineups, every providing six contrasting “takes” on the band’s synthesis of heaviness and psych-folk atmospherics.
Witchcraft owes its lifeblood to Pentagram, notably the framing of the late ’90s and early ’00s compilations that reintroduced the world to the doom band’s early Seventies recordings. That is echoed within the selection of covers: the ultra-obscure “Please Don’t Overlook Me,” which Bobby Liebling wrote as a 16-year-old, and (on subsequent variations of the album) an additional bookend within the type of “Sure I Do.” And it’s actually there within the tone of the album, which has the heat and immediacy of a band recording vintage-sounding songs on precise classic amps and gear, reside to reel-to-reel tape, absorbing the entire ambiance of enjoying collectively in a single room.
Pelander additionally channels Liebling’s fragility and vulnerability in his personal vocals, though listeners are inspired to concentrate on the way in which Pelander sings, not a lot what he’s singing about. He advanced right into a stronger, extra assured lyricist later, and is now much less reliant on reverb (like on “The Snake”) to seize a temper. The lyrics on Witchcraft that aren’t steeped in Arthurian legend, like “I Need You to Know” and “Please Don’t Overlook Me,” appear to narrate much more to meta-anxiety about how Witchcraft could be perceived. In fact, the sequencing of this album helps to counter that, with a slow-burn construct in the direction of the flashier elements, just like the prolonged jam on the finish of “You Bury Your Head” and the haunting association of “Her Sisters They Had been Weak” with flute and backmasked vocals.
In terms of occult rock revivalism, there’s Witchcraft and there’s everybody else. Many bands have pored over the sensible blueprint of Witchcraft and supplied refined enhancements that counsel that there’s multiple strategy to interpret the grey matter of proto-doom, however this merry combo of Swedish analog fanatics had been thus far forward of their time that it has taken everybody else 20 years simply to catch up. Together with Decibel, who’s now making an attempt to proper a mistaken after omitting Witchcraft in its personal 2004 year-end record in favor of a bunch of icky metalcore albums which have all aged as gracefully as a stripper with a decrease again tattoo. Whereas Witchcraft is tethered to a really particular time and place, however sounds timeless—one other extraordinary feat from a band that even makes being cool appear easy. Witchcraft Corridor of Fame, take one.
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