We've said it before and we will probably say it again, the best discoveries are those you weren't looking for, the ones by bands you have never heard of before and have seemingly come out of nowhere and then have proceeded to blow you the fuck away! This was the case with the subject of this review, Desert Psychlist was innocently scrolling through the feed on a certain social media giant when we noticed a post from Doom Charts contributor and long time fellow music explorer Mr Steve Rodger extolling the virtues of an album he had recently found. Thinking along the lines of if Steve is on this it must be worth checking out Desert Psychlist quickly followed the link and pressed play, what we heard next was a jaw-dropping collection of dark doomic grooves that ranged from heavy and mid-tempo to low, slow and lysergic. We were hooked as we hope you will be when you hear Black Sire's self-titled debut "Black Sire"
When Desert Psychlist first chanced upon Steve Rodger's post recommending "Black Sire" the first thing that hit us was the artwork accompanying it, a stark monochrome photo of a tower looming menacingly amidst a forest of trees set against a glaring orange background with the bands logo nestled boldly in one corner. It was an image that conjured up memories of bands like Iron Claw, Stone Garden and Sir Lord Baltimore, an image that screamed proto-metal and early doom, our only concern at this point was would the music beneath the artwork live up to the expectation it's imagery promised. We needn't have worried the grooves on "Black Sire" do not only live up to those expectations they exceed them. From the first dark notes of "Lord of Hallucinations" to the gentle fading drone that denotes the end of final track "Golden Dawn" the listener is taken on a journey of pure proto-doomic delight with swooping swirling guitar solo's and caustic crunching power chords , ingrained with lysergic textures and colouring, soaring and growling over rhythms and grooves that plod and grind one moment, race and gallop the next. "Black Sire" is partly an instrumental album, partly a vocalised one, when those vocals do appear, as on the already mentioned "Lord of Hallucinations" the sinister and lysergic "Horn of Samael", the eastern tinted "Night of Pan" and the schizophrenic "Golden Dawn", they are buried deep in the mix giving them a hazy, distant feel totally in keeping with the albums overall heavy doomic psych vibe. Black Sire do throw an unexpected curveball into play midway through the album with "Interlude", a droning acoustic instrumental that sounds like something that you would hear played by Arabian musicians at a Bedouin desert gathering, its a pleasing departure from the mayhem its surrounded by and goes a long way in proving that there is much more in Black Sire's locker than just a raucous riff and a thunderous groove.
"Black Sire" is not an easy album to describe, it is doomic in both the proto and stoner senses and it is heavy with lysergic texturing and colouring which would put it in the category of psych but there is also an underlying blackened edge to the seven songs contained here yet not so much so that you could categorize this as sitting at the extreme end of the rock spectrum. We have been mulling this over at Desert Psychlist and the best we could come up with is this … "Black Sire" is the best "stonerized proto-doomic blackened psych" album your likely to hear for a long, long time, if ever again.
Check it out ….
© 2019 Frazer Jones
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