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BLACK SPELL
Season Of The Damned

Helter Skelter Productions (2022)
Rating: 7/10

With their third full-length album in two years, Italian doomsters Black Spell is upon us once again like a blanket of suffocating darkness and an album cover quite typical of the genre. Even so, this is a highly anticipated opus dripping with occult imagery and ideal for a soundtrack to All Hallows Eve after you’ve binge-watch too many 70s satanic panic movies.

Very much channelling the roots of the early Italian doom metal scene and marrying it to the usual Black Sabbath and Pentagram influences, Black Spell ooze like a literal black oily mass across your carpet; a creeping, sinister trail of lumbering thick riffs and mocking vocal calls that flutter the curtains as you sleep.

This is a cauldron full of the usual ingredients – y’know, the eye of toad, tail of newt and wing of bat, all blended and resulting in those plodding drums and a general air of stuffiness. Nine spells are served up, the most notable being the opening ‘Satanic Majesty which numbs you with its languid style. But then again everything about this album is languorous – torpid, nightmarish creations conjured by fire and sent into the night as fat, bulbous slugs of Satan.

Rarely, if at all, does the pace quicken, but such is the blackness relayed it’s difficult to escape the arduous, lethargic snarls of ‘Curse Of The Undead’ and the rather aptly titled ‘Temple Of Drugged Sorceries’. Both of these tracks border on that sleepily satanic late 60s and early 70s occult psych craze which decades later has surely been flogged to death. However, with bluesy trudges of this nature so foot-tappingly sleepy and sadistic there still seems to be some life yet in such Manson family worship.

Neil Arnold

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