WITCHORIOUS ~ WITCHORIOUS .... review

Paris, France is renowned for being the city of romance but the city also possesses a dark underbelly, especially its underground music scene which over the years has given us bands like Domadora, Red Sun Atacama, Hyde and Grandma's Ashes, bands whose grooves could hardly be described as a reflection of their cities romantic reputation. Today we bring you another Paris based band, this one going by the name Witchorious, a trio consisting of Antoine (guitar/vocals); Lucie (bass) and Paul (drums) whose music could be described as sitting at the gnarlier end of stoner/hard rock but the more accessible end of doom and sludge metal. Witchorious first came to Desert Psychist's attention via their two song EP "The Haunted Tapes", an intriguing two song release that although a little disjointed in places showed a band brimming over with promise and potential, a promise and potential that has now come to fruition on their debut self-titled album "Witchorious" (Argonauta Records).

We tend to expect new albums to open up with something monstrous so as to set the scene for what is to follow and Witchorious deliver on those expectations with the appropriately titled "Monster", a track that encapsulates everything that is good about this band, the songs mix of sneery clean melodies and low guttural harshness supported by thrumming refrains and thunderous rhythms is manna from heaven for those of us who like our sludge and doom crunching and heavy but at the same time imbued with an element of old school classicality. "Catharsis" follows and here we find Witchorious ramping up the gnarliness by adding a little extra bite to their sonic attack but then routinely dialling back on that nastiness with off kilter vocal harmonies and alt-metal flavoured, guitar textures. The band dip their toes into occult rock territories next with the wonderfully atmospheric " The Witch", again the vocals posses a delicious sneery quality in their delivery but what really makes this song great rather than just good is the horn like motifs employed on the songs more up beat sections which punctuate the songs gloomy occult atmospherics like angels trumpets announcing the coming of divine judgement. "Blood" seeps out of the speakers next, a deliciously dank and dark opus boasting an intriguing  mixture of clean and quirky vocal harmonies and harsh growls over a groove that carries an essence of Polish riffmeisters Dopelord in its execution. An element of spacious heavy psych is introduced into the mix for next song "Eternal Night", bassist Lucie handles lead vocals here, her fey but not quite ethereal tones adding a pleasing haziness to the proceedings, a haziness enhanced by the cosmic swoops and whirls that wind themselves around the songs heavily psyched out doomic groove. And so it goes for the rest of the album, the gloriously schizophrenic "Sanctuaire", the instrumentally weird "Amnesia", the gnarled and sludgy "Watch Me Die", the reflective "To The Grave" and the superbly atmospheric final track "Why" are all well above average songs that are rooted in doom, hard rock and sludge but not anchored down by those roots, the band bringing elements of off-centred quirkiness and otherworldly spaciousness to their grooves to create a sound that resides in the canon of doom but is sat way to the left of its centre.  

Witchorious state in their liner notes that they "wanted to create more modern sounds and structures to avoid doing doom that we’ve all heard before" and listening to their debut album it would seem they have succeeded in doing exactly that. 

Check 'em out ....

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