Witchcult Today is one of those records that feels so simple and primal that you could just plug in, write it and record it on the spot, and that's not something I can always get down with unless its in the hands of a band like Electric Wizard. The Brits had long mastered their most daunting and crushing extremes with records like Dopethrone and Let Us Prey, and by the later 00s were settling into this catchier flow of raw, effective doom and sludge which I found just as hypnotizing as their formative releases. There is nothing pretentious or boring here, the music can speak for itself, exceedingly basic in construction yet just catchy enough to sing along with; this isn't some exercise in vapid repetition like Jerusalem but something with just enough variation and experimentation to fully immerse the listener whilst slowly punching them in the face.
Noisy, huge walls of fuzz that cascade at a crawled pace through Sabbath-like doom licks, it's that 70s foundation taken out to a wasted extreme, with very little concern for blowing out your speakers or sounding produced or polished...yet, the levels do somehow find a balance. The bass largely just plods along with the rhythm guitar, but that latter is so enormous that it's not about to find any competition in the mix other than Jus Oborn's wavering, drugged vocals, and that's only because they are genetically constructed to pierce through them. The drums might as well be trash cans, as long as they can provide the attention span with a steady pace to follow the catchy drudging. I can't tell you that a single riff on this record is original in any capacity, and yet I still enjoy it that much, because there's such a hideous conviction to how they're delivered. To be fair, they do layer in some melodies and bluesy wailings (as in the bridge of the title track) to create more depth, but this is the sort of record I might hate in the hands of someone less 'cool', if that makes any sense?
There are definitely some more psychedelic escapes here, like the noisy, quivering feedback of the interlude "Raptus" or the the moody mire of "Black Magic Rituals & Perversion", which sounds like the most atmospheric trad doom ever, given some ritualistic clout by the crazy fills and percussion as it transforms into this fuzz-fucked behemoth, only to later transform again into tribal droning noise with what sound like some reversed vocal samples. This shit is some of the most frightening they'd sounded since the aforementioned Dopethrone, and thankfully ground things back on planet Earth with the closer "Saturnine" and it's super-bluesy Sabbath lick and vocals that saturate the audience in stoner bliss, even if their lungs are as clean as a cathedral. Witchcult is just a transitive experience, like some of its own predecessors, the sort of record you come away from different than you went in, staggeringly heavy in tone but strangely accessible other than the weird bits. Cool blokes, cool cover, damn cool tracks, Lovecraftian and occult themes, what fucking else would you sign up for?
Verdict: Epic Win [9/10]
https://www.electricfuckinwizard.com/
