Well, be ready, because a new release by Weed Priest, from Galway, saw the light, or better the gloom, during these early days of August 2014. Last time we read about these doomsters from Galway was for their self-titled debut full-length album back in early 2013. Since then the band has been working on and reworking tunes with the same attitude of care they put in the making of the full-length album. This new dose of doom by Weed Priest is contained in the new EP called Worship, out as a cool digipack edition via label Hexenhaus as for their previous release. At the beginning of this year the band experienced some changes in the line-up, as drummer Adrianos "Z Goat" O’Helios (Adrian Healy) left, and two other fellow musicians, Michael and Sean Sullivan from the groove-sludge band Ten Ton Slug, came in. But the Worship EP stems from the combined effort and inspiration of the former line-up, with Adam on vocals and guitar, Raghul de Blood on bass and Adrianos "Z Goat" O’Helios on drums as well as on mixing and mastering.
The three long tracks of the Worship EP were crafted “in secret locations of the West of Ireland” during “unholy days” spanning between 2010 and 2013. There you can still find the features that made Weed Priest’s album so attractive for doom-addicted, i.e. the dirty, fuzz-laden, doped and occult doom heaviness very much in the vein of Electric Wizard, Sleep, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Black Sabbath, and so forth. However listening to this new release gave me the impression of a new direction for the band’s style, a new direction leading to a further increase in heaviness and, I would say, to a more personal imprint. The Worship EP consists of three suites, Ritual, Killvlad and Possessed that (I don’t know if by chance or not) combine into a unique creature.
The opening track Ritual (06:21) is dripping boiling hot sludgy blues crafted via a series of badass super heavy, thunderous doomy riffs competing with the multilayered cruel and sleazy, raw chanting by Adam. The downtuning of the guitars is extreme, the vibrations are almost solid during this bluesy doom ballad, but soon all the groove is suffocated by and eventually completely gives way to a deadly slow, suffocating funeral march which will accompany you till the end of the suite. This seems to be a sort of prelude to the fact that the rest of the EP somehow departs from the classic Electric Wizard-inspired doom-stoner imprint and adopts a somewhat different approach.
So when listening to the second track Killvlad (06:34) you get hit and floored by a memorable slab of doom. Killvlad is surprising for the style and the richness in sounds and solutions. The shock wave of the riffs combined with the drumming is breathtaking, while dissonance is added like spice to the riffs in competition with Adam’s nasty death-like choruses. But what makes this suite particularly addictive is the magic complex, spiral-like pattern of the leading doom melody. Such circular, spiralled pattern is monotonous yet continuously changing direction (keys) and imparting a proggy tinge to the leading doom lithany. Then, in the second half of the track such meandering pattern amazingly drifts into the territories of obsessive horror psychedelia reminding me of what heard in Oranssi Pazuzu.
Such spiralled patter seems to dominate also the third and last suite in the EP, Possessed (09:25). The suite is opened by the overlap of buzzing feedback onto scary audio samples dealing with a real exorcism (as I understood) performed by a priest on a lady called Mary Ryan back in 1996. But soon the devilish shrieks and the “purifying” invocations are swallowed by crushing, raw and distorted riffs again meandering like the coils of a huge snake. Such spiraled progression of doom melodies also remind me of old occult tunes by Pombagira, a charming and clever way of building up dark and hypnotizing suites where the obsessively repetitious, slow plodding rhythms are kept dynamic and intriguing. After the first half of the suite Possessed, dominated by dark occult atmosphere and sounds, the band starts morphing the leading sinister melody into something more epic, first, and then, briefly, adding a pinch of fully bluesy groove just as the one heard right at the beginning, almost like a single sun beam flickering before the darkness of occult doom and the shrieks of the possessed take over again till the end.
Killer …
Words: Marilena Moroni
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