Written By Kevin McSweeney
The United Kingdom is enjoying a prolonged period of unusually sunny weather at the moment. Ordinarily, you know it’s Summer in the UK when the rain gets warmer.
It’s generally obvious how this chilly, rain-lashed island was able to bestow upon the world the blueprint for doom metal, and indeed metal in general through Black Sabbath in the 1970s, and why its funeral pyre kept smouldering in the north of England throughout the late 20th Century and beyond, courtesy of such luminaries as Paradise Lost, Cathedral, Anathema and My Dying Bride.
Witchsorrow hail from Farnborough in leafy Hampshire on the relatively sunny south coast of England. This is a far cry from the dark and desolate moors of the north that have been the most fertile ground for their chosen subgenre.
Still, they’ve ploughed their particular furrow for over twenty years now, since their formation in 2005, and the release of their self-titled debut album in 2010.
Their fifth full-length album, The Devil and All His Works, which was released on July 3rd via Church Road Records, seems entirely at odds with the current climate.
It would have been far better to release it during the bleakness of the British winter, surely. Ah well, it’s here now, so I’m going to go through it track-by-track to distract myself from the heat, which is offering us some good practice for Hell if nothing else.
Omnia Finuintur
The title of the colossal opening track translates into English as “all things come to an end.” This is a peculiar title for an opening track, but I can’t help but appreciate a band who are willing to do things arseways.
I recognise kindred spirits in them. The album opens with what is presumably a death knell clanging away over a spooky-sounding organ, followed by slow-Sabbathy riffs stretched out over a languid beat. (People don’t always appreciate how difficult it is to play slowly.
Keeping precise distance between every strum of string and stroke of stick is certainly challenging at that speed.) It’s potent stuff despite its slow pace. You feel those hammer pulls in the pit of your gut!
Nick Ruskell’s vocals evoke Ozzy more so than the more aggressive styles of Nick Holmes or Aaron Stainthorpe. Despite the immense length of the track, the creepy church organ is used sparingly, making it all the more effective.
Bacchus
Bacchus was of course the Roman God of Wine. (I learned this when I was in school, courtesy of Peter Steele. No, he wasn’t my teacher. I just happened to be playing Type O Negative‘s October Rust album a lot back then, which featured the song In Praise of Bacchus.
He liked a drop of the ol’ vino, did Peter!) It might be due to a bit of indulgence that this song, relative speaking, comes racing out of the traps!
It gets up to around sixty beats per minute, which is notably fast for doom metal. There’s actually a bit of a stoner vibe to this track, though the lead guitar bears the mark of Paradise Lost’s Gregor Mackintosh.
There’s references in the lyrics to “gorging on blood”, and much about sin, but nothing about alcohol, though the way the song slows down to a stop at the end sounds like a musical representation of a slump into stupefaction, which is a nice touch!
Hades Chains
This was the most recent single to be released from the album. (The previous single was the previous track! I probably should have mentioned that earlier.)
The note I made for the intro was “Eddie Van Halen two-hand tapping his way over Black Sabbath’s Electric Funeral. This soon gives way, however, to a palm-muted chug that bears more of a resemblance to something like Sepultura’s Inner Self or Metallica’s Seek and Destroy.
Actually, the distortion on Nick Ruskell’s voice gives it a kind of Orgasmatron vibe. The vibrant guitar solo over bass drum hertas from David Wilbraham is as lively as doom metal dare get. No wonder they chose this one as a single!
Altar
Though we’re in full doomy dirge territory with this track, there’s something so very 1980s about that big, echoing snare beat. And when I say 1980s, I’m not talking about Saint Vitus or Candlemass.
I’m thinking more along the lines of Phil Collins. That aside, it’s straight from the Sabbath blueprint, bringing us back to the prior Electric Funeral reference.
There’s some arpeggiated guitar around the two-minute mark, and later repeated, that is worth the price of admission alone, and some subsequent vocal harmonisation that sounds strangely like Alice in Chains.
It gets ominous towards the end, with the sound of guitars wailing over a sparse beat consisting of a pulsing bass drum and occasional pounding of the toms. It’s all very much like the intro to Iron Man, minus the Beavis and Butthead air guitar tomfoolery. Having said that, the subsequent guitar solo might tempt them.
Lyrically, we have a depiction of a black mass of some sort. There’s some Latin in there, which I’m not going to repeat, lest I find myself getting the willies in the night, with my slumber disturbed by a persistent pair of ghoulies.
In Triumph We Rot!!!
Now there’s a proper old-school death metal title! I don’t know whether to interpret the lyrics as an allegorical reference to self-destructive tendencies becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as a literal account of a turn to the left hand path, but I do know that Obituary would have approved.
I certainly approve of the way they launch into this lively 6/8 time song with a brief drum intro. This is always a winner in my book.
It’s a relatively short song at around four and a half minutes, and sounds a little bit like Cathedral in full-on stoner metal splendour – minus Lee Dorrian’s beguilingly eccentric approach to vocals.
That said, there’s a bit of camp gothic horror creeping into the middle eight over clanking requiem bells, verging on Hopkins: Witchfinder General.
Also, I’m sure Dorrian would approve of the line: “Doom round our throats til the end,” As would anyone with an affinity for this kind of music. There’s some lovely lead guitar histrionics in the solo, and frankly, you can’t argue with a chorus like this:
triumph we rot
For this cursed mark
We are the damned
Grief enraptured
Rise from the grave
Forever doomed
Lamentation
This is something of a brief instrumental interlude, in which the doom metal verges on drone.
I say instrumental, but there’s a clip of, I think, Richard Burton as Hamlet, in which he mentions the title of the final track.
The time taken with the fade-in eats up a good deal of such a short song that, despite its Shakespearian content, is in many ways a musical equivalent of a Samuel Beckett play: short, surreal and thoroughly depressing!
A Quintessence of Dust
As mentioned previously, the elegant phrase that serves as the closing track’s title is derived from Shakespeare; specifically, a soliloquy from Hamlet.
Though they’ve gone with Richard Burton’s portrayal of the Danish prince, the rendition of it that I remember most fondly is the one that Richard E. Grant performs at the end of Withnail and I.
(I thoroughly recommend that film if you haven’t seen it. It’ll entertain you and depress you simultaneously, just like good doom metal.)
The track features a guest guitar solo from Sammy Unwin of Employed to Serve. His fingerwork is as deft and dexterous as were the linguistic flourishes of the late Stanley Unwin, to whom he may or may not have been related.
Lyrically, they’re at their most poetic on this song. This is only to be expected of a song with a title inspired by Shakespeare, I suppose.
They’re also at their most philosophical, evoking Vladimir Nabokov‘s famous metaphor for life with the following lines:
Between two blackened cliffs
A piercing light, dying
Fading between eternity
The salient quote from Nabokov is this:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The song references “a broken bough on every tree”, which makes me think of a cradle plummeting into an abyss. It’s an incredibly dark thought, inspired no doubt by the distant memory of the following nursery rhyme:
Rock a bye baby on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
It’s probably a good thing that I never had kids. This was a conscious decision, of course, due to me not wanting to inflict this wretched world on my progeny.
It’s definitely not because nobody ever deemed me worthy of passing my genes on to the next generation. Honestly!
Where was I?
Oh yes! The music!
The track opens with a riff that sounds like a cross between Paradise Lost’s True Belief and Metallica’s Wherever I May Roam.
There is a kind of stately grandeur to its slow progress. It is a mammoth of a track, plodding on slowly, safe in the knowledge that, even if it can be caught easily, it can’t be stopped.
This is at least until around half way through, when it switches to a shuffle beat and explodes into life in the manner of Cathedral on The Ethereal Mirror.
It is at this point that Mr Unwin’s dizzying fingers make themselves known to us. It then slows down again, and slopes off to its sorrowful end under the sound of the very death knell that opened the album.
I like this technique. It reminds me of the way James Joyce opens and closes Finnegan’s Wake with that business about the swerve of shore and bend of bay. His work was fucking depressing as well!
Final Verdict: Witchsorrow – The Devil and All His Works Review
Ultimately, it’s a bit of a Marmite situation with this album. (Marmite is a savoury food spread made from spent brewer’s yeast. It is known for being highly polarising.)
If doom-laden dirges aren’t your thing, there’s going to be little to recommend this album to you, save for maybe the relatively upbeat Bacchus and Altar. Even then you might struggle.
If, however, you like it dark, rich and eminently spreadable (switching lengthy songs for savoury comestibles) then you’ll rate this album very highly indeed.
Just like Marmite, it’s distinctly British, it’s something of an acquired taste, and it goes very well with a bit of cheese. Personally, I happen to love Marmite.
Metal Lair awards The Devil and All His Works by Witchsorrow four and a half devil horns.
Tracklisting
1. Omnia Finiuntur
2. Bacchus
3. Hades Chains
4. Altar
5. In Triumph We Rot!!!
6. Lamentation
7. A Quintessence of Dust
Members:
Nick Ruskell – guitar/vocals
Emily Ruskell – bass
Scott Taylor – drums
David Wilbraham – drums (on album)
Upcoming shows:
23.07 London @ The Scala [with Bat Sabbath]
20.08 Bristol @ ArcTanGent Festival
10.09 Sheffield @ Zephyr’s
11.09 Glasgow @ The Classic Grand
12.09 Liverpool @ Arc:Hive [with Pantheist & Monolithe]
26.09 Southampton @ Abyssal Festival
05.12 Wolverhampton @ Bloodstock Winter Gathering
Witchsorrow Online
About The Author
Kevin McSweeney is Metal Lair’s resident scribe of the underground, eternally rummaging through the global metal scene for riffs worth your time.
As the guiding hand behind Seven Deadly Songs every Friday, he has an uncanny knack for finding the track you didn’t know you needed, usually before finishing his pint.
Equal parts loyal, kind, and quietly razor-witted, Kevin brings deep knowledge, impeccable taste, and a steady, reliable presence to Metal Lair.
Read More From This Author:
Album Review: Apocalyptic Steel by Nargaroth
Album Review: Altered State by Defiled
BlackMarket – Radical Views EP Review
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