Album Review: "Brimstone Coven" by Brimstone Coven

Let's review: Black Sabbath is awesome.

Retro rock is awesome.

Harmony is awesome.

Psychedelia is so awesome that it's a crime against humanity that the art form died out in the early 70's.

Enter today's review, Brimstone Coven. Even though they are on Metal Blade Records, I question how truly metal they are.

They remind me a bit of Baroness, insomuch as they are not a metal band per se, but have metal influences. As this post goes on, I think that you'll be able to understand this quite well.

Brimstone Coven

From the top down, they are as retro as the day is long in July.

The guitars feature what seems like only amp gain. The drums are a loose. The vocals sound like a chorus of voices.

These songs remind me a lot of old school Black Sabbath, but the very beginning before there was such a thing as metal, because of the way they swing. Metal is the disowned bastard son of the blues and early on, metal had that swing, that groove, that feeling, that whatever you want to call it.

Brimstone Coven has brought that back in spades.

The music, though not always playing the same thing at the same time, swings and grooves in a way most music just does not do in 2014.

Even though the guitars are low gain, the songs are very sludgy. How in the world they managed that witchcraft is beyond me. There is some crunch to the guitars, but there's no high compression high gain riffing here.

Solos are here and there, like early Sabbath, they're slow, languid, and lucid. It would be so easy to turn this album on, pour a drink (or whatever) and get lost in the grooves. This is one of the rare times that I'm saddened by the semi-death of vinyl.

It would be glorious to watch this record spin while getting lost.

Release: 8/5/14
Genre: Psychedelic Rock
Label: Metal Blade
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