Black Widow
Sacrifice

THE REVIEW

The Black Widow weaves her web in the darkness.

Thin threads like silver paths on the road to nightmare. Simple lines of acoustic guitar, winds, and Hammond, inviting and captivating: you follow them because the desire to discover what lies at the center of the web is too strong. There, a seductive and gentle voice awaits you, taking you by the hand to guide you to a place that, it promises, will be warm and safe. It's only when the spider opens its jaws that you discover that place is hell.

The music of Black Widow is a painting made of a few strokes of black pencil, light and shaded, where magical and ancestral figures take shape, remnants of a time and place that perhaps never existed.
It is a journey through the dreamlike distortions of the creator and mentor, Jim Gannon, a young guitarist from Leicester who, around the second half of the '60s, managed to gather around him a group of musicians capable of sublimating in sound his almost obsessive interest in occult themes, mystery, and, let's not hide it, Satanism.

"Sacrifice," released in 1970, just a few months after the Black Sabbath's debut record, is perhaps the most beautiful of his nightmares, the most vivid of his decadent frescoes. It is set against the melodies of Clive Jones (flute, sax, and clarinet) and Zoot Taylor (Hammond and piano), visionary and enveloping. Now soft and impalpable like whisps of fog, now dense and suffocating like furnaces, they are the most progressive face of the Black Widow sound: brush strokes that do not define the contours but rather confuse and distort them, curls of sounds and notes sometimes with an almost "liturgical" flavor ("Sacrifice"), brilliant in allowing themselves instrumental diversions sometimes languid and sunny, of Frippian memory, as a backdrop to nightmares and demonic apparitions ("Seduction").

In the foreground is a malevolent elf dancing around the fire. It is the voice of Kip Trevor, the most insidious of the traps hidden in the web. Proud, yet cordial, he seems to want to tell of a dream that remains in his eyes, of a story not yet escaped from his head... You almost cringe as you discover him singing of lost civilizations, of ancient Babylons ("In Ancient Days"), of demons and men in their service, of rituals lost in the mists of time, and of fingers stained with blood...
You seem to see it, the circle of souls holding hands. You see them dancing entranced to what seems little more than a nursery rhyme ("Come To The Sabbat"), you follow them across fields and forests illuminated by the moonlight, you let yourself be hypnotized by the pulsing of primordial drums. And then all goes silent. Until the souls turn to look at you, they call to you ("come, come, come to the sabbat... satan's there"), they become insistent, hallucinatory, the circle becomes a spiral, a vortex dragging you downward... and the sacrifice begins.

The beauty of "Sacrifice" lies entirely in the chiaroscuro, in the contrasts. In the ability to evoke vivid images, to astonish the listener with brilliant insights, real coupe de theatre, in a sort of "latent wickedness" that seems to pervade music that, in itself, might seem harmless. Perhaps not on par with many masterpieces of the period, neither for originality of sound nor for the taste of experimentation, it remains a small black gem of folk rock, with intense progressive veins, with the merit of having attempted (paving the way for many bands that still try today), to give a sonic dress to the occult, to visions, and to nightmares. It is music that attempts to strike the listener from behind: deceiving them with its immediacy, with the calmness of tones and sounds, only to disrupt their certainties, should one delve beyond the notes.

It's a dark fairy tale that few know: simple and with an uncertain happy ending... and, perhaps for this very reason, even more beautiful to listen to.