The final product, Black Magic Rituals & Perversions Vol.1…, is as raw and heavy as one would expect from The Wizard.
“It's raw as fuck,” boasts Jus. “It’s like a lost ’70s black metal demo rehearsal session or something. It’s raw, nasty, screaming in your face. I always promised Electric Wizard was like rats in your face. This is verging on it.”
As anyone who’s experienced them live – headlining stages at Download Festival, or London’s iconic Roundhouse – will know, Wizard gigs are a dark celebration of heaviness and volume and bad vibes. Here, the songs sound like a violent hallucination that takes you into their world. Just as their studio works carry in them a sense of sleazy horror, drug-altered reality and middle-fingered misanthropy, the songs the band tear through here drip with the heavy, sinister vibe of having been caught in the crypt of the wizard.
“It was a more about capturing atmosphere and capturing energy,” says Jus.“I was really excited by the idea of just recording us playing purely live to tape and making it sound as raw as possible, like an old, lost recording. We used shitty mics, crappy old tape machine, put it together as fast as possible and just went for it. No one's sitting down, no one's got headphones on, we’re all fucking headbanging, just going for it.”
Opening with the enormous Dopethrone, and taking in signature apocalyptic doom staples like Witchcult Today, Satanic Rites Of Drugula and the ever-destructive Funeralopolis, the set caught on tape here shows how powerful and dominating The Wizard can be. As a band who never quite play the same thing twice, even Just notes that over the years some of these versions have grown more sharp edges and barbs than their studio counterparts.
“Some of the stuff from [2010 album] Black Masses, I was really happy to give it more of an edge,” he says. “And even stuff like …Drugula, I think it's probably a little bit laid back on the album. It's really such a creepy song about a creature coming up from the grave, and the live version sounds more spooky.”
Jus says he wanted to capture a feeling like that of Motörhead’s classic No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, or the sense from KISS’ ALIVE! that you were getting a window into something, a world the band created. It’s also, he says, an opportunity for a band as big and cult-like as The Wizard to bring something from metal’s dirty underbelly into the light, if only for the purposes of freaking out the unprepared.
“It's kind of more got an underground feel to it,” says Jus. “We've always been trying to drag in the underground into the overground, rather than pretending to be playing some big stadium, arena show.”
Indeed, what you have here is Electric Wizard red in tooth and claw. There’s no overdubs, no cheating, no putting things through the computer to neaten up afterwards, just a band conjuring up their black magic and capturing it as directly as possible, to the point where you can feel it in your speakers.
