To say that the recent Electric Wizard album sounds like Electric Wizard would possibly be a very lazy analysis of the situation, but hey – this sounds like Electric Wizard. It sounds so much like Electric Wizard that it literally hurts. Even with Tim Bagshaw back on drums (for long enough to record this record anyway) it just sounds to me exactly like the last two albums. It seriously boggles my little mind how Wizard can (let’s be honest) keep recycling the same old shit and still have it sound fantastic as fuck.
The biggest thing for me with Time To Die is the production
sound; it’s much more sludgy, even a bit meatier than its predecessor, and adds
a clarity to the swampy sound of thon Wizard of Electricity. As great as Black
Masses is, it sounds like it was recorded in an active wind tunnel and then
some “new guy” at the studio sucked all the fucking bass and treble out of it.
For such a brilliant album, it sounds truly, truly awful.
Anyway, Time To Die is awesome. For me it picks up as the
album develops; the triple whammy of “Funeral Of Your Mind”, “We Love The Dead”
and “SadioWitch” is absolute top class doomery. The whole thing has a recurring
theme of eery keyboards and samples relating to satanic worship meandering in
and out every so often. This cumulates in the closing outro track “Saturn
Dethroned”, which takes the eery keyboard widdly-widdly-ness to epic new levels
of spookiness.
Despite the fact that I like to complain about everything (but
hey, I’m an internet blogger – we’re the scum of the universe) please, please
be assured that Time To Die is a fantastically heavy record by a longstanding doom
metal legend.
