ELECTRIC WIZARD at Lee’s Palace, Sunday, April 5. Rating: NNNNN
The thing people forget about Black Sabbath is that for all their anthems of atomic apocalypse and love letters to Satan, they were a posi- band. Ozzy was singing about surviving and showing the world that love is still alive even in the face of utter despair. Electric Wizard – probably the best, or at least the heaviest, doom metal band since Sabbath invented the genre – brooks no such optimism.
Singer/guitar god/gutty chud Jus Oborn sings about the world burning and nuclear warheads ready to strike and being nothing and it being time to die o’clock. He does it while digging into the heaviest, deepest, loudest, riffiest riffs, like a big-ass excavator hollowing into the earth’s crust, the whole world collapsing beneath him.
Electric Wizard haven’t toured North America in over a decade. And in that time they’ve went from being a stoner-doom cult oddity to one of the most formidable names in heavy metal, basically by releasing the same album of bone-rattling doomsday riffage over and over and over. Their set featured hits from genre classic Dopethrone, their new record Time To Die and 2007’s Witchcult Today, all sounding similar but powerful.
It’s not about the abiding intensity but the way it builds and swirls and consumes and destroys. By the time they closed with a searing run through of Funeralopolis that shook the foundations of the packed-out Lee’s Palace and jangled the skeletons of everyone in it, Electric Wizard’s rep as the heaviest band in the universe was certified. And then some. This is metal at its heaviest and doomiest. Music to watch the world burn to. Music to die to. Music to be nothing to.
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