Witchcraft
The Alchemist

THE REVIEW

I have thought about how to start this review more or less a thousand times.

I jotted down notes, scribbling catchy phrases on every scrap of paper I could get my hands on, and searched for suggestive and improbable metaphors, hoping they could best convey the sensations, the colors, the "magic" that pervades a Witchcraft album.

These same few lines demonstrate how my efforts have proved futile: the thousand ideas that have "wandered in my head" for days remain doodles on one of the many Word files seduced and abandoned in the double bottom of my hard drive.

A few days ago, however, I remembered a passage from an interview with I don't remember who, read who knows when, from who knows where: "Our time is no longer the time of Fellini. Ours are the years of Gus Van Sant who remakes Psycho shot by shot, but injects a small vibration of renewal into it."

Now, I know I'm not much of a "music thinker," yet I believe something like this can also apply to Witchcraft's production. Like prisoners of a spell that kept them asleep for more or less forty years, the four from Orebro (Sweden) have awakened in the third millennium, in time to rescue from oblivion the tomes of the ancient dark rock wizards of the '60s/'70s, reprising their spells with the dedication of a trusted and capable apprentice. Victims of the sting of a wicked witch, they seem to want to keep dancing, oblivious to avant-gardes and experimentation at all costs, to the sound of an alchemical music, crystallized in an ancestral and pagan space-time dimension, where hard rock, folk, and blues are adorned with dark and bewitching allure.

Now on their third full length, they decide to enrich and embellish the too-explicit references to esoteric doom of the Coven-Sabbathian mold that characterized their previous works and begin to trace a path that, although running parallel to the great names of the past, can lead precisely to that "small vibration of renewal."

So here, along with the unabashed worship of Black Sabbath ("Hey Doctor"), amidst the magmatic boiling of doom rhythms, alluring and fleeting winks to Deep Purple hard rock and the blues of the best Cream ("Leva") emerge. Here, the curtain of the acid abrasiveness of distortions opens more and more often to give way to elegant folk interludes ("Samaritan Burden" and the splendid title track) and a renewed instrumental heterogeneity (listen, for example, to the sax in the tail of "Remember" or the wild Hammond of "If Crimson Was Your Colour").

The result is seven pagan liturgies beautiful as a woman dancing around the fire without knowing she is being watched. Seven rites in which the rock of the '60s/'70s is celebrated, not only reprising its stylistic elements and solutions but also trying to fully evoke the spirit, the attitude.

Seven bad night tales in which Magnus Pelander's haughty and seductive voice (an ideal halfway between the more inspired Ozzy and a new Jim Morrison of the enchanted forest) tells us not to close our eyes and to be afraid.

Because everything will go wrong.