Electric Wizard (2) – Wizard Bloody Wizard

Why the hell is this sleeve bigger than all my other records?

Irritated by the fact that the inner sleeve was split in transit when shipped as new and sealed, which is avoidable by standard record dealer practice at the point of production, but also that the sleeve itself is too big for a regular protective cover!

Electric Wizard have always been a band that wore its Black Sabbath influence on its sleeve but if you couldn't really make out the picture they were painting through all the haze of larger than death fuzz guitars and generally choked out drum sounds (...because the fuzz was so overblown) you'd miss the reference. Electric Wizard took the tropes of what would be defined as Doom Metal and did their due diligence in keeping it slow but kept the groove and did that a lot better than some of the heavyweights building modern Doom in the 80's and 90's. Overall, Sabbath never quite dragged as slow as this and never sounded as enormous on any record of theirs. Eventually, Electric Wizard based the pace of entire albums (Witchcult Today, Black Masses) on a relatively faster but still very moderate tempo. A few tracks here and there would be upbeat like classic punk but still bogged down by super saturated guitars and chromatic and tri-tone based chord structures before a series of "sped up" albums. But now, they've gone from borrowing the 60's and 70's film grain in their album accompanying artwork and have taken to blending their own sonic evolution in performance style and dressed it up in the actual audible aesthetic of the 60's and 70's. There are definitely rhythmic nods to past decades but when making those references on earlier EW albums, it still reeked of modern Doom with a throwback aesthetic.

Wizard Bloody Wizard, in all of its titular referential glory, doesn't just sound like a nod to Sabbath. Its sounds like they hopped in a time machine and did this recording under the absolute strictures of the limitations and enhancements of the audio recording technology in the era of the first 4 Black Sabbath LPs. Its sounds like the same amps, same mics, same console, same preamps, etc. that would have been populated by the engineers of the late 60's through early 70's were used to make WBW. Now, all that said, the actual cadence of the flow of the album as a whole, the flow of each individual track, and the timbre of Jus Oborn's vocals are decidedly Electric Wizard in all of the collected stylized accumulation of influence and creativity upon which the band has built their name through all the years and personnel changes. Each time you think the guitars are going to go full Iommi, they get reigned back into that thing that defines Electric Wizard's own voice. Some of the tastiest passages of music are when Liz and Jus's guitars entangle in just the right segments of lead line harmonization that harks back to Iommi's style of harmony but it still feels like an impromptu coincidence of the band improvising these songs into existence. The production style of this album could have been applied to songs that sounded like the band's more modern take on the genre they have helped define but it wouldn't be as effective. As much as the albums feels like was born of jamming ideas over and over then collecting the pieces and assembling them into songs, it also sounds like large chunks were outright intentionally written deliberately to sound exactly as they do and pondering this while listening is part of the charm of this album.

I can see why long time fans might be turned off by this stylistic change, or rather this very direct focus on a specific aspect of Electric Wizard's influences. It doesn't sound like the typical celestially powered destruction that they have created on most of their earlier albums. It doesn't sound like the Sabbath/Iommi stomp taken from its mother and deconstructed and reassembled in a gory mess. It sounds like coming full circle and reconstructing that gory mess into something like the source it was originally taken from and that may be too foreign for those who have become accustomed to the mess. I think time will prove that this album will be rediscovered by the naysayers. If you hated it, come check on it in a year or two and see where it sits with you then. Its clear that Electric Wizard sought to make a sonic statement with Wizard Bloody Wizard. The statement truly is effective and is an example of one of the best sounding and sweetest grooving heavy albums in modern Doom. It seems like the band has come full circle and I'm excited to see where else they go from here.

Kudos to Garrett Morris of Windhand fame for engineering on this record and helping to achieve the sonic glory displayed herein.

Bland, boring, uninspired. Electric Wizard have finally become a pale imitation of themselves with this release.

Time to pack it up, EW.