ALBUMS

High Priestess

Casting The Circle RIPPLE

Just like witches at black masses.

The overwhelming impulse for most adventurous metal musicians is to go further out into the extremities, to play faster, heavier, wilder, to put animal heads on pikes or drown the audience in blood. LA doom power trio High Priestess take a different approach, pulling all their energy inward, creating an intimate, meditative and devotional experience, while still delivering the expected tri-tones and walloping slabs of fuzz.

Casting The Circle sounds like the kind of thing you might stumble into midway through The Devil’s Rain. It’s so cult-y it might be impenetrable to the casual listener, but Mariana Fiel’s mournful chanting and Katie Gilchrest’s funereal organ and droning psychedelic guitar flourishes are so hypnotic it’s practically impossible to escape their bewitchments. The eerie 10-minute doomscape Erebus is a highlight, what with its ghastly intonement (‘The sun spills blood on the sea’) and incessant finger-of-death riff, but honestly, the whole thing will overwhelm and mystify you in the best way possible. Total doom.

Sleazegrinder

Datura4

West Coast Highway Cosmic ALIVE NATURALSOUND

The 70s are alive and in very good spirits.

Dom Mariani’s place in Australian rock history would be ensured even if all he’d ever made was The Stems’ debut album At First Sight, Violets Are Blue, a note-perfect power-pop collection and one of the best Oz albums of the 80s. But since then he’s popped up in multiple guises, carving out a career that encompasses everything from surf instrumentals to hard rock – and that’s where Datura4 come in.

Fourth album features big 70s riffs spiked with garage-band moxie, and Mariani’s ear for melody lifts it above the ordinary. is a mid-paced blues chug soundtrack, sounds like something John Lennon might have written during his more primal moments, and is a groggy stoner anthem that climaxes in a whirl of Hammond organ. Terrific.