Blood Ceremony
Living With the Ancients
Rise Above

It’s been three years since Toronto’s Blood Ceremony drew us into their sect of satyrs with their self-titled debut, binding us to dungeon walls until such a time our sacrifice was desired, and it seems that moment has indeed arrived. Sorcerers of retro ritual rock, Blood Ceremony lay down doom-powered riffs over top hellfire organ, but their weapon of choice is the dark mistress Alia O’Brien, whose mastery of voice and flute are the spells that bind and hypnotize. Like its predecessor, Living With the Ancients is a bone-carved chalice overflowing with the fog of a pagan prog potion, and where one ends with a hymn to Pan the other begins with another such ode to the great half-man, half-goat God, thus continuing the sacred bloodline of influence and imagery that courses through all they do. You’ll also find demons, witches, hermits, magicians, ancient Roman priests, and W. Somerset Maugham’s caricature of Aleister Crowley at this monster’s ball, a medieval European masquerade not unlike the pentagram parties thrown by The Devil’s Blood, Ghost, Year of the Goat, Witchcraft, and so on. So, go ahead, offer yourself up to Blood Ceremony’s wicked ways. You’ll be glad you did.

Listen to “My Demon Brother” from Living With the Ancients!

Cathedral
The Guessing Game
Nuclear Blast

Twenty years of caravans and carnivals, funeral marches and phantasmagoria, witches and whores. Twenty years of shaping the pagan metal landscape with heavy grooves and medieval riffs. Twenty years of Lee Dorrian’s high mass madness and apothecary anarchy. Twenty years of Cathedral. Twenty years of DOOM.

Ok, I’m not here to tell you whether or not Cathedral’s first ever double album, The Guessing Game, is good or not. We are well beyond those kinds of formalities. As members of an illustrious, iconic group of doom metal pioneers that includes Black Sabbath, Pentagram, Candlemass, Trouble, and Electric Wizard, Cathedral have earned your undying devotion, your unfaltering allegiance, and the benefit of the doubt over the years (not that they’ve ever needed it). I will tell you, however, that The Guessing Game’s stylistic blueprint is gloriously eclectic; Cathedral flexes its signature, thick, Stonehenge sized guitar muscles on songs like “Edwige’s Eyes” and “Casket Chasers” but the progressive, psychedelic demeanor of songs like “Funeral of Dreams” and “Cats, Incense, Candles and Wine” hearkens back to the days of Vanilla Fudge, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, and King Crimson. Of course, you’ve also got the classic dope n’ roll of “Requiem for the Voiceless,” which crawls on all bony fours like a hungry prisoner to a plate of cold gruel. So, is it good? You already know the answer to that, my friend. But if you must really know, it’s unruly and evil, and sounds like twenty years of doom has finally taken its rightful toll.

Check out this video teaser for The Guessing Game!

The House of the Devil (2009) is, as advertised, based on true and unexplainable events, and set in the early 80s, a time when 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults. I had high hopes. First of all, not only is it set in the early 80s, but it also looks like it was shot in the early 80s. This movie has an excellent retro feel to it, from the music to the film quality to the kind of suspense building found in such earlier horror classics as Black Christmas, most of which is supplied in the first hour and fifteen minutes of the movie wherein Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) explores and acclimatizes herself to the countryside mansion she’s “babysitting” at for the evening. However, that kind of intense mood can come across as slow, but I didn’t mind the pace too much. What I did mind was the pace at the end of the movie, when the action and blood rolls in, because it came and went in a flash compared to the rest of the movie, and left me scratching my head. But hey, at least there was some blood and action, so let’s get to that now.

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