If you ever wanted to hear what Electric Wizard might sound like with female vocals, this is the band for year. Featuring venerable ex-Wizard can-basher Mark Greening, Dead Witches recorded their sophomore effort in the same rural English studio as Dopethrone and Let Us Prey…although I’d say this one sounds more akin to the Wizard of 10-12 years ago, i.e. Witchcult Today or Black Masses.
After a 30-second horror-movie intro, the title track gets things properly underway with a classic Electric Wizard riff and vocals that certainly channel Jus Oborn, but with a bit more upper register. “Goddess of the Night” contains plenty of wah and fuzz-pedal effects, with a soaring vocal and crunchy stop-start riffs making this a piece of prototypical stoner doom, complete with an eerie organ outro. We get a jangly, gothic 98-second interlude in “When Do the Dead See the Sun” before “The Church by the Sea” offers up another solid stoner-doom riff with the airy, anguished vocals one would come to expect from the Wizard…or the Witches, for that matter.
(Heavy Psych Sounds)
