Well I remember the fateful day, all those years ago, when I first checked Electric Wizard’s ‘Dopethrone’ out of the library. Returning home and putting it on through headphones with no particular preconceptions, I was reduced within seconds to a quivering mass of pupil-dilated, headbanging stupefaction, and a certain part of my life was changed forever. THIS is what heavy metal should sound like, THIS is what I want and need from it. It was (and is) beyond words. As the band themselves chant on their ode to Conan the Barbarian, as if pre-emptively carving their own epitaph: you think you’re civilised / but you will never understand.

When encountering vintage Electric Wizard for the first time, the things that will tend to immediately grab the listener’s attention will be Jus Osborn’s inhumanly fucked, super-saturated guitar tone, and the tormented, breathless rasp of his vocals. A full appreciation of the extent to which the other two guys, toiling away in the rhythm section, were responsible for the music’s power takes more time to acquire. As such, it was only natural that, when Osborn reconvened the band about a decade ago with what turned out to be a fairly fluid line-up subbing for the band’s original line-up of Mark Greening (drums) and Tim Bagshaw (bass), I was on board from the outset, hoping for the best.

Through an increasingly unsatisfactory new catalogue of increasingly mediocre material, I kept the faith and looked at the nice cover art, but eventually, the penny dropped. One dire trudge through last year’s truly dreadful ‘Time to Die’ set, combined with contemplation of a number of public feuds and disagreements and general childish, negative vibes emanating from the band’s press and PR, and I finally pulled the plug. Like many other fans I suspect, my good will is exhausted and I’m outta here.

And thus the question rings out: with the ‘Wizard disgraced and deposed, who now step up to claim the Dopethrone?

With perfect timing then, arise Sir Greening and Sir Bagshaw, returned from their respective campaigns in Ramesses and 11 Paranoias, and here to reclaim their kingdom, proving in the process that they never really needed Jus in the first place.

With Bagshaw handling both bass and guitar, and bulked up to trio / ‘proper’ band status with the addition of label boss and no-introduction-needed metal legend Lee Dorrian handling lyrics and vocals, With the Dead released their debut LP with little advance fanfare a few months back, and, whilst I admit I have not subsequently carried out a full survey of reactions from within the ‘doom community’, I can only imagine that, broadly speaking, they happily fell of their knees in supplication before their new masters. (I certainly know I did.)

From the opening blast of full-spectrum, gain-ripped sludge that tears across ‘Crown of Burning Stars’ following the inevitable creepy, sampled intro, ‘With the Dead’ is legit - a compromise-free, undiluted return to the kind of lumbering, punk-spirited and flat-out terrifying heavy metal carnage that Bagshaw and Greening previously helped to perfect on ‘Dopethrone’.

If Dorrian’s slightly more nuanced (‘professional’, perhaps..?) vocal delivery isn’t *quite* as throat-rippingly malignant as Osborn’s was at it’s peak, and if Bagshaw’s guitar doesn’t dissolve *quite* so often into blackened, producer-worrying noise, this LP still represents at least 90% of the unholy spirit that animated that aforementioned classic, retooled and reenergised as if the intervening fifteen years had simply been an extended fag-break.

A welcome point of human contact amid the cliffs of towering, sub-bass oblivion conjured by Bagshaw & Greening, Dorrian’s previous gig fronting Cathedral helps him invest the psyche-tinged Egyptian death-goddess anthem ‘Nephthys’ with a kind of arch, cosmic dignity, even as his plunges gamely into familiarly necrotic depths on ‘Living With the Dead’ and ‘The Cross’, unabashedly recall the kind of frenzied, morbid teenage scribblings from which the whole aesthetic of heavy metal was first born.

To hear a gang of middle-aged men indulge in such stuff is admittedly kind of ridiculous, but, wedded here to the genuine menace conjured by Bagshaw and Greening’s stygian wrecking ball grooves, sounding like the rampage of ‘Sabbath’s Iron Man extended from its pulp sci-fi origins into the blackness of a gruelling torture porn ordeal, it is also revealed to be actually kind of awesome, in much the same fashion that ‘Wizard’s gleeful, hate-filled excesses used to ring so true back in the day. By the time closing epic ‘Scream From My Own Grave’ whites out on a glacial, one-note dirge accompanied by plentiful samples of some, well, screams from the grave, even the most skeptical of doom fans will I think find themselves thoroughly satiated.

Direct, unpretentious and heavy as a planetary extinction event, ‘With The Dead’ is hands down the best post-‘Dopethrone’ music I’ve heard in years. It is exactly what heavy metal should be. If you like heavy metal (of the Sabbath lineage, at least), you will fucking love it. Simple as.

‘With the Dead’ can be obtained on vinyl & CD direct from Rise Above. They seemingly have no truck with digital releases, so we recommend you do the decent thing and take the plastic.

Labels: best of 2015, With The Dead