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Burning Witch: Crippled Lucifer (reissue)

02/06/09 || Khlysty

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
H.P. Lovecraft “The Call of Cthulhu”

“When I first heard Burning Witch, I laughed. And then, I did not.”
Aaron Turner (in the liner notes of the 2008 reissue of “Crippled Lucifer”)

Yep, lassies and germs, that’s exactly the thing you’ll gonna do while listening to “Crippled Lucifer”, the lavishly executed reissue of the 1998 Southern Lord combination of the two records the Witch unleashed upon the hapless public in 1996 (“Towers…”) and 1997 (“Rift. Canyon. Dreams”): you’re gonna laugh; madly; uncontrollably; to tears. You won’t be able to believe what you’re listening. No band in the known universe can be so fuckin’ heavy, so incredibly morose, so impossibly slow. So, you’re gonna think that the whole thing’s a fuckin’ joke; I mean, come ON, even Eyehategod, or Crowbar, or fuckin’ Grief inserted moments of breathing space inside the slaughter of their music. NO-ONE can be so fuckin’ asphyxiating towards the listener. I mean, fuck, you want us to listen to your music, right? So, why the hell do you make it so incredibly difficult, so… hostile to the listener? So over the top, that the only way for us to accept it, is to take it as a joke?

Well, to understand this, one has to understand who was behind Burning Witch and what was their goal. So, the Witch was formed in 1995, after the breakup of Thorr’s Hammer (with whom I shall deal pretty soon…), by the two guitarists of da Hammer, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson. They kept at hand the Hammer’s drummer Jamie Sykes, they recruited bassist G. Stuart Dahlquist and added in the mix vokillist Edgy 59; and they started writing music with the sole purpose of making the world more dark and painful. Before recording anything, Anderson fucked off to play with Goatsnake, but his absence was not critical to the band; y’see this was O’Malley’s first personal project and it woulda been whatever he wanted it be, no matter who was or wasn’t in the band. And what he wanted the Witch to be, was a band that would defy the rules of time and space and that would warp once and for all the face of heavy music in general and doom metal in particular.

And that’s exactly what happened within the length of two recordings: the Witch broke the gates screaming and foaming in the mouth, with mountain-like riffs, funereal rhythms and a vocalist that combined clean singing with the screeching of witch burned at the stake (yeah, I know, the pun is retarded, but, believe me, it’s totally apt). “Towers…”, the first of the two pain-filled documents of Burning Witch’s short life, recorded by none other than Steve Albini, starts off with a bang, a broken-down, warped 3/4 rhythmic pummeling, with the downtuned guitar almost losing the battle with feedback, the rhythm section attacking on all fronts and Edgy 59’s heinous screaming fighting for air in the viscous instrumental background. The rest three songs slow things down to a 10-times-the-earth-gravitational-pull pace, the riffs stretching like taffy and slowing time so much as to make it obsolete, creating a void so big, as if to swallow the whole universe.

Things aren’t much better with “Rift. Canyon. Dreams”, which marks the departure of Jamie Sykes and his replacement with B.R.A.D. as the Witch’s skinsman. Here, the band takes a turn towards more experimental paths, pulling the music to its logical breaking point and making everything so much more crazy and black that it becomes almost a torture to listen to this record. Everything here is so over the top, so impossibly dark and slow, so deadening to the senses, that this record should be bought only with a doctor’s prescription and with lots of warnings about its consequences to the listener’s mental and physical health. This is not doom metal, but, most probably its logical end: nothing can be more depressive than this. Nothing can top – or bottom, whichever you like – its extremity and nothing should do it. So, to fight the effects of such music, you close your mind and you approach it as Aaron Turner did: you laugh, and then you stop laughing, as the darkness slowly gathers around you, smothering everything…

For the 2008 reissue, Southern Lord went the whole way, giving top quality for the buck: a 40-page booklet with pix and art and what-have-you, plus two CD’s – one for each record -, with three bonus tracks (“The Bleeder”, “Communion” and “Rift. Canyon. Dreams”) that complete the whole recorded oeuvre of the Witch. So, yeah, this is a good incentive to buy the record, but, y’know, when everything’s said and done, it’s the music that counts. And what’s contained here is the apex of doom metal. The absolute top. The doom that eclipses all light and embraces darkness in ways that can be so scary – because they are so real -, as to make you lock your brain, just to stop the input from your ears. This is music that will make you physically ill, that will make you want to go clean yourself after being exposed to it. If that’s not the highest praise I can give to the Witch, then try this: anything more extreme than this would have been banned forever, everywhere, for the good of public…

10 Lucifer’s rising out of 10.

Information
Released: 2008
Label: Southern Lord
Website: www.southernlord.com/band_BNW.php
Band
Edgy 59: vocals
Stephen O’Malley: guitar
G. Stuart Dahlquist: bass
Jamie Sykes: drums (“Towers…”)
B.R.A.D.: drums (“Rift. Canyon. Dreams”)

Tracklist
Towers…
01. Sacred Predictions
02. Country Doctor
03. Tower Place
04. Sea Hag
05. The Bleeder
Rift. Canyon. Dreams
01. Warning Signs
02. Stillborn
03. History of Hell (Crippled Lucifer)
04. Communion
05. Rift. Canyon. Dreams

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