Praise for Wizard Smoke‘s The Speed of Smoke from Creative Loafing Atlanta: Wizard Smoke’s second coming weaves the doom and marijuana riffage of its Live Rock in Hell debut, with prog tendencies that carry the music to higher places. The production is stepped up all around, from songwriting and conceptualization to the overall sound and depth of the recording. ‘Dead Wood’ and ‘Butcher’ open the album as a pair of solid post-Sabbath face-melters. James Halcrow’s apocalyptic shriek gets a Vocoder in ‘Weakling’, creating a mercurial feel.
There is a detectable cheese factor hiding amid such lyrics as ‘Vultures perched in high trees, surveying the ground‘, as heard on ‘Growing’, but it’s all part of Wizard Smoke’s style. The album’s strongest asset is that each song brings something different to the blackened, oceanic metal rhythms, but it’s bound by an underlying dirge that peaks with ‘Witches Brew’. It’s a monolithic conclusion to a terse album that expands upon Wizard Smoke’s already wicked charge, making the band’s sound so much greater than the sum of it’s doom-laden, stoner-rock parts.
Download The Speed of Smoke free. Choose high quality (320k) or low quality (192k) MP3s
Out on vinyl and cassette April 30th
Tags: Album of the day, Chad Radfor, Creative Loafing Atlanta, sludge, The Speed of Smoke, Wizard Smoke
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 6:21 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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