A few years back (2013,to be precise), I had the good fortune to be present at a conference organised by James Machin entitlef The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres. Whilst there I listened to a fascinating paper on drone metal, weird fiction, and religion, which in turn introduced me to the very wonderful back catalogue of Dunsanian drone metal band, Bong.
More recently I discovered Electric Wizard; whilst apparently categorised as ‘doom metal’ rather than drone, Electric Wizard seem to fall into stylisticly similar category to that of Bong (at least to my untrained ears), trading in a comparable aural commodity by way of grinding, heavy, repetitive riffs and broadly related (though not overlapping) themes; with regard to the latter, whilst Bong tend to focus on spacey Dunsanian weird cosmicism, Electric Wizard is more your 1970s psychedelic folk horror by way of The Devil Rides Out.
In any case, Electric Wizard’s Witchcult Today is the focus of today’s Lovecraftian Thing. Whilst they certainly don’t qualify as an explicitly ‘Lovecraftian’ band, there is definitely a Lovecraft vibe to Electric Wizard’s musical stylings, which to me feel like a lost soundtrack to Roger Corman’s 1970s adaptation of The Dunwich Horror - with regard to which, Witchcult Today does contain a very fine track entitled ‘Dunwich’.
Nice.
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