WITCHSNAKE
WITCHSNAKE "Deathcult of the Snake"
By Dr. Abner Mality
Joining the endless procession of WITCH bands we now have WITCHSNAKE from Italy and boy, do they know how to deliver greasy, grimy RIFFS soaked in acid, diesel and smoke. This is knee buckling stoner doom of a high caliber.
It won't move the needle as far as anything new goes, but if a cross between early FU MANCHU and prime ELECTRIC WIZARD topped with pure biker grit sounds good, this is your jam for sure. The SNAKE comes up with a growling, raw guitar sound that will rattle your teeth....sure to appeal to WIZARD and FU fans. There's lots of wah wah psych guitar jamming going on all over the place and even down and dirty blues, but this shit is heavy and rough. Vocals don't appear in every song, but sound like a cross between a Lemmy growl and an Ozzy croon when they do.
And yeah, man, those riffs! They start coming right away with "Outlaw" and just don't quit from the rest of the record. WITCHSNAKE hits the sweet spot between the head-nodding groove of stoner rock and the heavier, more ominous crunch of true doom. The biker/blues style is paramount on "Laughing Among the Ruins", "Let Us Prey"-era ELECTRIC WIZARD propels "Inject The Venom" and there's even HIGH ON FIRE barbarity in "Battlescars, the Great Purifier". Every track has at least one riff that will take your head off.
"Deathcult of the Snake" is pretty close to being an archetype of the stoner/doom style...