ELECTRIC WIZARD released their third live album, Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1, on Friday 13, December 2024. Usually when a band drops a live album in the last month of the year, you get the feeling there was a looming contract obligation that needed to be met before year-end. But Friday 13^th is kind of a befitting day for a band like ELECTRIC WIZARD. Couple that with the fact that the album, a “one-take dungeon session,” was “recorded live to analog tape at Satyr IX Studios” on Walpurgisnacht in 2020, and the doubling up of ill-reputed nights becomes especially wicked.

Though ELECTRIC WIZARD formed in the way back of 1993, the set list for Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1 comes from only four albums in their vast discography: Dopethrone, Time to Die, Witchcult Today, and Black Masses.  Oddly, the name of the album is taken in part from a similarly named instrumental on their Witchcult Today album. Not sure that means anything, but a curious factoid.

The album is bookended by “Dopethrone” and “Funeraloplis,” both from their 2000 seminal Dopethrone album. This version of “Dopethrone” is abbreviated by more than half compared to the studio version, while “Funeraloplis” picks up some additional heft. Overall my personal favorites are “Black Mass,” a classic that has been covered by about 1001 doom metal bands since 2010; “Incense for the Damned” which kicks off with a clip from the 1969 biker movie, Satan’s Sadists—the scene where Anchor gets all preachy and then shots three people; and “Witchcult Today” which is extended by a solid three minutes and capped off with a clip of some eerie chanting.

2020 seems like a distant bad dream. It’s hard to remember the level of sheer insanity that gripped the planet. The fact that Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1 was recorded live in studio on Walpurgisnacht in 2020 is mind-blowing considering that on the night of April 30, 2020, 91% of all countries had closed their borders. Black Magic Rituals and Perversions, Vol. 1 lays testament to the talent of one of the most revered Doom Metal bands on the planet. Also, does the existence of Volume 1 suggest there is Volume 2 in the making?