In 2024, Electric Wizard returns with their first album in seven years, Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1 (Spinefarm Records), a live album. Returning with a live album is one thing but this isn’t your ordinary live album. Usually, when one thinks of live albums, you may think of hearing bombastic stage sounds and roaring crowds, but Electric Wizard chose to record to an audience of each other and to the fans with the idea that people would get to hear what a band, trapped in isolation with the thought of possibly never playing again. The result of this album is a crushing presentation of songs that are even more raw, angry, and fist-clenching than before. 

Raw is an understatement when it comes to trying to describe this album.  Songs like “Dopethrone,” “Satanic Rites of Drugula,” and “Black Mass” find them playing with a sense of vulnerability like anything could go wrong at any point. On the contrary, this one-take recording is everything that is right and more.  

The unpolished, live-recorded sound also has Electric Wizard performing without the restraints of recording in a proper studio, where any band is more likely to hold back a bit or even feel somewhat limited to performing the way a studio engineer or producer would steer them. Electric Wizard took the wheel and, by doing so, made an album that is what Electric Wizard wanted to make.  

Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1 is as much a sensory experience as an auditory one.  This isn’t an album to be played as background music.  This album deserves the listener’s time, focus, and complete attention to become a part of an immersive experience. Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1 captures a band playing like it could have been the last time they would ever play together in a time when the future of our world was uncertain.  

Buy the album here:
https://electricwizard.lnk.to/blackmagicritualsandperversionsvol.1

8 / 10
DON DE LEAUMONT
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