Label: Rise Above Format: CD,LP
Flute-tinged witch rock debut from Toronto’s Blood Ceremony. These days a lot of metal bands head straight for the big Black Sabbath riff, slow it down, and just stay there. However, I don’t think Blood Ceremony are too interested in what lots of metal bands are doing these days. They look back to the era of bands such as Coven, Affinity, and Black Widow, capture the prog tendencies of Sabbath and fuse it with a huge pagan doom-laden riff out. Vocalist Alia O’Brien‘s flute solos are something else … they give Blood Ceremony a unique quality.
Flute is an instrument that’s virtually never heard in metal, and has been in the rock wilderness since the seventies, though used and abused by the Ozric Tentacles, but seldom heard otherwise. Chunky riffs sandwich extended solos, walls of psychedelic organ, rockouts with flute and guitar double up. Yeah, all in all prog as hell. Blood Ceremony is a very retro album. The band utterly revel in ’70s occult rock and ’60s psychedelia and they do it very well. It really is 1971 again – the eighties, nineties, and naughties never happened.
-Alaric-
