Various Artists
Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles
Numero Group; 2014
By Jason Heller; March 5, 2014
The atmosphere that permeates Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles seems straight out of someone’s incense-fumigated, window-blackened basement circa 1975. As well it should. The 16-song collection is a murky snapshot of mid-1970s American proto-metal, a loose confederation of groups working mostly in obscurity and isolation that drew on the supple yet thudding heft of Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and Black Sabbath. But unlike the tape-trading metal culture that was just a few years away, these bands had little to no DIY infrastructure through which to spread said sounds. A handful of American groups of that era such as Sir Lord Baltimore and Pentagram managed to persevere, push though, and become better known. Warfaring Strangers pays alms to those who didn’t.
As altars go, there’s plenty to worship. Drawn from 7” singles released throughout the 70s on tiny regional labels across the continent (Toronto’s Sir Lord Baltimore-esque Triton Warrior being the disc’s lone Canadian delegate), the band leading the charge is Medusa, whose full-length, circa-’75 document First Step Beyond surfaced in 2013 and helped bring about this set. “Black Wizard” appears both here and on First Step Beyond. It’s well chosen. Suffused with tape hiss and an almost orchestral gravitas, the song captures occult vibes, galloping dread, and overreaching stabs at jazz-prog virtuosity that lend it an unhinged urgency. The sorcerous, first-person narrative could have been sung from the perspective of Sabbath’s titular “The Wizard”, and as with legions of doom bands to come, Ozzy is held as chief druid. But Tolkien is the demigod: A love of The Lord of the Rings, then recently popularized in rock thanks to Led Zeppelin, bleeds through on “King of the Golden Hall”—courtesy of Iowa’s geographically displaced Stonehenge—and “Song of Sauron”, a track by Michigan’s Sonaura, who used to spread their harmonized sludge as openers for the Stooges and the MC5.
What makes the bands on Warfaring Strangers so compelling, though, are their idiosyncratic visions of weird America. A decade before Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” became the national anthem for would-be suburban warlocks, Tampa’s Wizard—formed by survivors of the 60s teen-garage scene—sang “Séance”, a tuneful, alternately delicate and distorted paean to Satan as a metaphor for the druggy counterculture. In this same environment that their fellow Rosemary’s babies such as Arrogance and Inside (both, miraculously, from North Carolina) converted local bog-water and Heep-worthy organ riffs into the near-Lovecraftian hymns “Black Death” and “Wizzard King”, respectively. Largely unaware of the metal tropes and conventions being carved in stone in the mid-70s—mostly in England, where early metal connected, codified, and thrived—San Antonio’s Hellstorm let the fuzz drift and the funk unfurl. The only African-American group on Warfaring Strangers, Hellstorm ends the anthology on a bloodcurdling note: The decade’s laidback haze is fed, with sacrificial zeal, back into itself.
Numero Group, the label behind both Darkscorch Canticles (as well as Medusa’s First Step Beyond), might have gone a little overboard with the supplemental release of a companion board game titled Cities of Darkscorch. Or maybe the gesture is exactly overboard enough. After all, these bands were not going for realism or restraint, choosing instead to champion an amped-up, all-American arcana for a post-Manson decade in which hippie mysticism had turned ink-black. If True Detective had been conceived in the 70s and set from sea to shining sea instead of the Deep South, Warfaring Strangers might have made for a gloriously eerie score.
01 – Air – Twelve O’Clock Satanial
02 – Wrath – Warlord
03 – Stonehenge – King of the Golden Hall
04 – Triton Warrior – Sealed in a Grave
05 – Junction – Sorcerer
06 – Stone Axe – Slave of Fear
07 – Wizard – Seance
08 – Stoned Mace – Tasmania
09 – Arrogance – Black Death
10 – Sonaura – Song of Sauron
11 – Dark Star – Spectre
12 – Inside – Wizzard King
13 – Space Rock – Dark Days
14 – Medusa – Black Wizard
15 – Gorgon Medusa – Sweet Child
16 – Hellstorm – Cry For The Newborn