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The Sabbathian - Ritual Rites review




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Reviewer:
8.7

7 users:
7.29
Band: The Sabbathian
Album: Ritual Rites
Release date: September 2014


01. Ancient's Curse
02. Ritual Rites
03. Nightshade Eternal

This album sounds as if it were recorded in a daze - but was it the visionary purple haziness of a mystical psychedelic journey, the perception-altering horror of a satanic ritual, or the low-fidelity first fumblings of a young and raw band? Perhaps all three.

What strikes me the most about Ritual Rites is how superb, how simply superb, the atmosphere is. Without, for just a moment, considering the songs or the performances, The Sabbathian's approach perfectly captures the essence, the vibe, the whole shtick of early Black Sabbath and the late '60s dark psychedelic/hard rock scene. Anette Gulbrandsen's restrained and haunting vocals, the tremendously Sabbath Bloody Sabbath guitar tone, and the sinister riffs sound like Coven mashed together with ancient blasphemers like Lucifer's Friend, Jeronimo, and Suck, and rebranded into a new breed of heavy band under the supervision of Black Sabbath. The Sabbathian claim to be greatly influenced by Candlemass, and this is not difficult to believe, but their sound is so irrepressibly old-school that you could easily believe that they influenced Candlemass.

Everybody and their grandmother tries to be Black Sabbath; it's a universal truth, like "breathing is necessary" or "The Exorcist II was a terrible movie." Yet most bands try to achieve this by listening to Black Sabbath and copying the extrinsic qualities, while The Sabbathian sounds like they replicated the very process by which Black Sabbath became Black Sabbath. The trio performs this all-too-brief trilogy of plodding, archaic doom tracks with the slight hesitance and disbelief of a band that has stumbled onto something it cannot quite explain. You hear a group of smoke-filled visionaries decide they are fed up with this hippie business, form a band for the sheer philosophy and anarchy of it, and then accidentally push the boundaries so far that they invent a new form of malevolent music.

Perhaps the most stunning thing about The Sabbathian is that it is not an underground occultist band from the 1970s that wrote soundtracks for Italian horror movies in a cave somewhere, and Ritual Rites was not discovered recently after 40 years of sitting in a box with dusty grimoires, Dario Argento films, and Black Sabbath first pressings. The fact that this mini-debut is only three songs and 20 minutes long reinforces the impression that this is some kind of lost recording we were never meant to hear - but since we have been granted the opportunity, it would be inexcusable to waste it.


Rating breakdown
Performance: 10
Songwriting: 9
Originality: 5
Production: 10





Written on 16.10.2014 by I'm the reviewer, and that means my opinion is correct.


Comments

Comments: 1   Visited by: 90 users
17.10.2014 - 19:47
ManiacBlasphemer
Black Knight
Interesting. I am impressed by this resurgence of bands with an old school psychedelic/doom vibe (especially the bands with a female singer, but not only). Gonna check these guys.
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