Electric Wizard
Black Masses
Rise Above Records

Those inevitable three year gaps that Electric Wizard puts between albums are always a heavy burden, man. There are very few bands I crave mind, beard, and soul, and England’s preeminent merchants of DOOM are one of ‘em, so when that seemingly infinite wait finally comes to an end, it’s a crushing exaltation. Thus Black Masses, the band’s seventh, has been received, and it doesn’t waste any time ripping into your psyche with the hyper-fuzzed “Black Mass” and Venus in Furs” before slowing down on “The Nightchild” to feast on what’s left of your mangled being. The rest of the album continues on in this relentlessly ritualistic, utterly dope, serpentine fashion, all while Jus Oborn faithfully wails away from some mid-level purgatory wasteland while tortured souls claw at his throat. It’s a brutally weird and noisy ensemble at times, punctuated by the unusually acid-fried “Turn Off Your Mind” and the thematic interplay with 2007’s Witchcult Today, courtesy of the album’s longest, most menacing song, “Satyr IX” (see “Saturnine”), and the stormy, brooding, frenzied feedback of “Crypt of Drugula” (see “Satanic Rites of Drugula”). It feels awfully good to be in the deathly embrace of the Wizard riff once again.

Listen to “The Nightchild” from Black Massses!

The most buzzed about movie in the last year or so has to be The Human Centipede (First Sequence). Of course, you won’t find it at your local Blockbuster, so the wife finally managed to track it down on the Internet just so we could find out why this movie made people wretch and squirm and turn their head away in pure disgust (if you believe what you read in cyberspace, some people were so turned off by this movie that they walked out of test screenings). So, what’s the big deal then? Ass-to-mouth, that’s what, but not the porno version. More of a literal, torturous version. There’s no doubt that writer/director Tom Six has a twisted mind (again, if you believe what you read in cyberspace the idea for this movie stems from a joke he made about punishing child molesters by sewing their mouths to a trucker’s ass) because the nature of this movie falls right off the scale, and it is indeed stomach-turning, but I wasn’t as shocked by the gratuity of this film as much as others seem to have been. Maybe it was all the hype, but I was let down by its sicko factor.

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The fact that 2009′s The Collector comes from the same dudes responsible for writing the Saw franchise well past respectability and straight into this-is-just-getting-stupid-now territory (those being numbers IV, V, and VI) is a heavy burden to lay on a movie, and although the movie squirms and fights as best it can, it’s unfortunately unable to free itself from that constraint. A fitting description given that The Collector is, as you can imagine, all about captivity and torture. And booby traps. Yes, lots of booby traps. It doesn’t really make a lick of sense, mind you, and you have to suspend your disbelief from the fucking rafters like a bound and gagged body in order to shut it up from asking any sensible questions (and you’ll be wanting to ask a lot of them, believe me), but sometimes that doesn’t matter when some dude in a leather mask is terrorizing a helpless family for shits and giggles and hurting them in creatively sadistic and terribly painful ways.

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