Label: Metal Blade Records
Release date: 01.11.2019
Production: James Atkinson
Album length: 47.50 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8.5 / 10
Angel Witch are one of those legendary bands who, almost 40 years ago, broke new ground with their musical vision, alongside Iron Maiden, Saxon, Diamond Head, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Tank and their peers, in a genre that soon exploded worldwide, fast and straight as an arrow, into countless subgenres, and is still evolving. A band still revered as an inspiration by Dave Mustaine and his former buddy Lars Ulrich, and one that inspired the late Chuck Schuldiner too. They were there at the start, right where it all began. They were part of the movement called N.W.O.B.H.M., and at the same time they were what we now understand as the pioneering, “bare-bones” and most primordial version of heavy metal. Their debut “Angel Witch” (1980) is considered a cult classic of that era and one of the crown jewels to come out of the N.W.O.B.H.M. days, and it’s lost none of its evergreen appeal. Which is why it should be part of the album collection of every household (in Slovenia, where Ćale Sale, among others, “slices the daily bread of bitter musical intellectualism”, that’s obviously not possible).
The band, and yes, we’re talking about Angel Witch again, was never exactly lucky when it comes to stability and consistency, and over a span of more than four decades it has strung together just five albums. The latest of them landed at the end of this November. That’s “Angel Of Light”, which follows, after seven years, the excellent “As Above, so Below” (2012), the record that brought Angel Witch back to the scene and reactivated them when it comes to new releases too. Despite a meager discography, the band never vanished from the scene for long stretches of “hibernation”. We count just two (temporary) breakups in their career. The first happened soon after the debut came out, when Heybourne threw himself into Blind Fury, and the second between 1998 and 2001.
What’s essential about this band is surely the voice of Kevin Heybourne (the occasional resemblance to Witchfinder General vocalist Zeeb Parkes is uncanny), the only original (and founding) member in the current incarnation of the band, which operates as a quartet. Seven years is once again a generous stretch of time in which ideas can fully come to life and get optimized into a new package of original songs. “Angel Of Light” pulls this off with ease and, alongside the current albums from Satan, Diamond Head, Raven, Tygers Of Pan Tang and Cloven Hoof, stands among the guard of surviving generational old-timers produced by the N.W.O.B.H.M. movement as yet another guarantee of excellence and an absolute generational one-off. That means an album like “Angel Of Light” in 2019 could only be recorded by a band led by Kevin Heybourne. In 2019 he has held on to vocal characteristics that sit within an inch of the energy his voice radiated on the debut. As if 40 years had never passed in between. Next to the excellent production, or let’s say a very deliberate production that purposely kept the spirit of times long gone, offering a raw, very natural, unpolished, organic, live and “demo-ish”, even mildly garage-y, punk-rock-ish sound, it’s the vocals (along with inventive guitar phrases full of character) that are the most important element through which Angel Witch keep all their credibility and appeal in 2019 and with their fifth album, after more than 44 years in action. You can hear that most of the record was cut “in one take”, in other words “first go, first attempt”, and that the Angel Witch crew can’t stand modern (trendy) software tricks like copy-pasting motifs, which means that no two bridges and no two choruses within a single song on the new album are the same. Old school, rock’n’roll running through their veins. That’s another element that only confirms Angel Witch are absolute generational oddballs and a breed of dinosaurs who “don’t want to” and “can’t” go extinct (as a hint, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep still do the same thing in the studio today).
Angel Witch keep a strong, expressive recipe going and are remarkably convincing in new times and with new riffs. Atmospherically, the album is still full of fury, disappointment and rebellious posturing, and the band approaches the writing and execution head-on, frontal and utterly aggressive, as if they weren’t 44 years old but had only just formed. Kevin Heybourne and Jimmy Martin play the guitars with incredible joy and commitment, and you can feel it, not just in the piercing phrases but also in the embellishments, like the triple harmonies added to passages or the revisited solos. The album is distinctly dark, carries a clear dystopian streak, and feels devastatingly cathartic and possessed. The motifs are tremendously inventive and full of internal variety thanks to a constant, incisive (and inspired) spark of ideas, though the feeling is that the songs could still be a touch shorter, which would give the main motifs more exposure and make the songs grab you even harder. Night Is Calling is the longest composition on the album and in places draws inspiration from the character and work of Black Sabbath. At the same time it feels a bit stretched out and could have been two minutes shorter, since it packs in some seriously good ideas, like the transitional motif that starts at 03.51 min and the spot shortly before the five-minute mark where the track shifts into a faster tempo driven by yet another hugely distinctive riff, in which both guitar solos grab hold. An excellent song, especially if it aimed for a bit less length. Angel Witch also serve up plenty of straight-up satanic slapping on the new album, from the bristling opener Don’t Turn Your Back to the even sharper and more dramatically doomed We Are Damned later on, as well as the distinctly occult smack of classic self-destruction that is Window Of Despair.
The legends hold up. They remain masters of their craft and handle the recipe they know inside out to perfection. “Angel Of Light” isn’t as varied as its predecessor “As Above, So Below”, but it keeps all the core elements that define the character of this cult band. The sound and the style of its expressive nature feel fresh, untamed and concise, and so it effortlessly whisks the listener off in a time machine to way, way back, when heavy metal was still a stomping little rascal.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
01. Don’t Turn Your Back
02. Death from Andromeda
03. We Are Damned
04. The Night is Calling
05. Condemned
06. Window of Despair
07. I am Infamy
08. Angel of Light
Line-up:
Kevin Heybourne – vocals, guitar
Jimmy Martin – guitar
Will Palmer – bass
Fredrik Jansson Punkka – drums
