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BLOOD CEREMONY
The Old Ways Remain

Rise Above (2023)
Rating: 9/10

After a seven year silence Toronto, Ontario-based doomsters Blood Ceremony clamber from their dusty vault to bestow upon us more psychedelic tales of terror.

Beginning with a riff similar to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’, ‘The Hellfire Club’ announces the band’s return with a once again wistful approach in the haunting vocals of Alia O’Brien who, on rather spectral fashion, charismatically drifts through this opus on the clouds of her flute, organ and of course the rumbling, ominous intensity of her bandmates.

Blood Ceremony effortlessly marries late 60s psychedelia with a robust, stripped back 70s groove while also applying tinges of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. The glorious jaunt of ‘Ipissimus’, the folky dream-like escapade of ‘Mossy Wood’ and the breezy pop psych elements of ‘Hecate’ seamlessly entwine with the darker shuffles of ‘Widdershins’ and the funkier ‘Eugenie’. To an extent there isn’t a great deal of metal on offer for the rainy brigade, and I’m fine with that because what one does get is a myriad of styles coated in that psych-folk serenity that exists all so close to folk horror shadows.

Whether it’s the cool strut of ‘The Bonfires At Belloc Coombe’ or the steady mantra of ‘Song Of The Morrow’, Blood Ceremony showcase a style that oozes the same sort of merry menace that one would expect to find in the hovel of a West Country wizard, only this time the shadows are less thunderous and more kaleidoscopic.

Neil Arnold

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