Record of the Week - 04/11/2011

Witch Cult – Witch Cult (Holy Roar Records)




I begin by quoting Wikipedia,

‘While originally the term powerviolence included stylistically diverse bands, powerviolence generally refers to bands who musically focus on speed, brevity, bizarre timing breakdowns, and constant tempo changes. Powerviolence songs are often very short; it is not uncommon for some to last less than 30 seconds…Powerviolence groups tend to be very raw and under produced, both sonically and in their packaging…’


Witch Cult are a powerviolence band. If you don’t like powerviolence or if you’ve never heard of it and the little summary above doesn’t tickle your fancy, you should probably stop reading now.

The reason is that powerviolence is possibly the most marmite like genre in existence. You either love it or hate it with a burning passion. There is, I have found, no middle ground. It is too extreme and underground a genre to accommodate fans who simply ‘like’ a few bands or songs. The stripping down of hardcore to its bare minimum and then cranking up of the feedback factor does not appeal to everyone.

If you’re still reading, congratulations. I can tell you that, as powerviolence goes, this is a good album. Ten songs in ten minutes may set a record for the shortest ‘long player’ ever and leave you a bit surprised then it ends the first few times you give it a listen through, but while the music lasts it is well worth the effort. While lo-fi enough to make the vocals gloriously undecipherable the ‘under produced’ factor hasn’t been taken so far as to render the whole record unlistenable (as is sometimes the case). This is no doubt helped by the fact that, under all the chaos, there is actually some very interesting music bubbling away.

‘Burnt Flags’ has a real sludgy Sabbath-esque feel to it with opener ‘Grimm Frost’ (at two and a half minutes one of the albums' longest track) being in a similar, doom filled vein. ‘Deteriorate’ shows off some perfectly executed tempo changes while ‘Burn’ joins it in showcasing the faster, trashy approach to powerviolence.



The closing track ‘Break’ is probably the albums' best. Starting off with a fast, in your face burst of riff and screams it morphs into chugging juggernaut of a song that you can image sound tracking certain portions of the end of the world before collapsing and dying in a slump of feedback. It also manages to do all of this in two minutes and thirty nine seconds, which is the longest any single track on the record gets.

There is, however, a portion of this album that doesn’t quite fit the picture I’ve tried to paint so far. Tracks like ‘Fuck You, Fast Slow’ (three seconds long) and ‘XBig LurchX’ (nine seconds) don’t really add anything other than a very short mid album blur of noise and, as you might guess, are too short even by powerviolence standards to make much of an impression. The first half of ‘Release’ is a similar story, although the spasmodic breakdown and ending go some way to make up for it. It's almost like the band are trying to put you off.

All in all though it is a record that, if you are a Powerviolence fan, you’ll probably like a lot. If you’re not a fan, then you’ll probably struggle a lot more with it. In many ways it is a bit of a mixed bag, boasting moments of brilliance that hint at a real bright future as well as a few moments where you’re left with a big ‘what the fuck?’ thought bubble hanging over you. That being said, it’s the sort of mixed bag record where the positives still outweigh the negatives by a mile, and for that reason, its going to keep turning on my stereo for a while to come yet.

(‘Witch Cult’ was release on the 31st of October, it is available via the Holy Roar Records website in Vinyl and Digital forms).