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Today is Monday and this is volume 666, of Metal Monday. Actually it’s just volume 6, but an important rule in Heavy Metal is that if anything is the number 6, you add 2 more 6’s. A footnote is that if it’s a 3 you can also add 2 more 3’s, and if it’s a 9, you certainly add 2 more 9’s. I frequently see records released by “die-hard metal labels” that are alleged to be in editions of 333 copies, and I can only think what a lie this must be as no record I know of has ever been pressed without an over-run, and no pressing plant I know of would press in such an odd number.

REGARDLESS - I Found this Electric Wizard “Supercoven” E.P. which may go kind of cheap because of how it’s listed. It’s the original Bad Acid label pressing, not the repro on Southern Lord. Even though this is technically only 2 songs, and billed as an E.P, it’s actually over 30 minutes (though a lot is spaced out droning), and as good as the best EWiz stuff, (as it came shortly before they released Dopethrone). Of course 1996 saw the release of Come My Fanatics, which is their 2nd lp overall, but the first to really display their trademark sound of saturated guitar and bass, lumbering riffs, distant drumming, and “Lovecraft on Acid” lyrics, leaving behind the fairly classicist Doom approach of their s/t lp. What they came up with was much more sinister, a bit more “punk”, and often scoffed at by those who prefer masturbatory wanking over realism and primal heaviness (yea I just said Primal Heavieness). These are the people posting 4 star reviews of recent Cannibal Corpse albums on Metal-Archives though, so honestly, I feel sorry for them.

I’ve often wondered if Come My Fanatics was recorded on a cassette based 8-track, but even if it wasn’t, I feel as if it had to have been recorded in the band’s dank, smelly, practice hole - it just sounds that way - you can smell the mold in the walls and the ancient dust in the corners. I’ve also sometimes wondered if they just didn’t have a bass drum for that recording, but either way it turned heads, it was exciting and felt imaginative, even when it couldn’t have been more obvious from where it was derived. Most bands could take this kind of attention and run with it. Not Electric Wizard. No, instead they were all arrested.  Marijuana possession, assaulting an officer of the law, and of course armed robbery (each member got booked for one of these things, it was not a group effort). A lot has been made of where the line between fantasy and reality is in music. Electric Wizard never made a big production of being hardened criminals, the primitive recording and delivery of a record like Come My Fanatics no doubt feel thuggish and a bit depraved, but nothing more. There it is though: the bonged out, mean as hell hippies from Dorset have a better wrap-sheet than half the rappers on your TV. Well… I don’t know if I can really call them hippies, but they were at least long haired potheads.  So it was that their follow-up lp, Dopethrone (with a cover depicting Satan, doing what else, smoking dope) was not released until 4 years after Come My Fanatics, which is a lifetime and a half in the fickle and fast moving “underground”. But in the meanwhile, they were able to pull together Supercoven, the auction linked so many words above this spot. It’s maybe the group at their most self indulgent, but also at their best and most inspired.

The “stoner rock” craze has come and gone at least twice over since Electric Wizard started making a name for themselves, and yet 2007 saw the release of  their 6th lp “Witchcult Today”. Though only singer/guitarist Jus Osbourne remains from phase 1 of the band, it tells the same story that all their records tell, using the same phrases they always use like, “Wizard in Black” and “13 Candles” to tell it. It’s still a great story though. The best stories are the ones you want to hear again and again. Hail the Wizard from Dorset.