��� Acid Witch's 2008 debut Witchtanic Hellucinations is now available on limited-edition cassette, featuring thirteen songs of killer horror movie obsessed heaviness and groovy, fx-splattered doom (which also happens to feature Finnish sludgemonger Lasse Pyykk� of Hooded Menace / Vacant Coffin in his only full-length recording with the band). Starting off with a ridiculous intro track that sounds like something off of one of my old Halloween-themed spoken word Lps on the Caedmon imprint from the early 80s, Hellucinations quickly gets down into the bubbling swamp-muck with their mix of burly Sabbathian riffage, gurgling guttural death metal-style vocals, lysergic guitar spew and trippy electronic sounds, sounding not too unlike a more beastly version of Cathedral high on 70's occult horror films, the day-glo pastaland splatter epics of Lucio Fulci, and loads of vintage Halloween visuals. My kind of party.
��� Acid Witch throw in all sorts of weird touches in building their stoned basement fug across this album, with moaning voices drifting in from behind the rocking metallic chuggery, washes of spacey Hawkwindian synth-gloop surging out of their many passages of creeping, crawling doom, cauldrons bubbling beneath droning psychedelic guitar spew and nocturnal sounds and howling wolves introduce one pulverizing down tuned deathgroove after another. They even slip into some purely instrumental soundscapery on tracks like "Beastly Brew", where gusts of wah-drenched guitar meets slabs of cavernous black drift soaked in reverb, or the spires of gothic organs and dreamlike electronics that make up the brief interlude "Realm Of The Wicked". Those keyboards are one of my favorite aspects of Acid Witch's sound, their eerie analogue tones and shifts into gothic organ sounds obviously nodding in the direction of those vintage 80's horror movie scores from Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter; where most bands would be content to use that sort of thing to simply introduce a song, Acid Witch incorporate those creepy, hallucinatory keyboards right into the meat of their music, evoking the feel of classic early 80s splat cinema even as the band is grinding out their monstrous doomdeath. I said the same thing about Stoned, and its just as applicable here - Acid Witch really does sound like the perfect fusion of Forest Of Equilibrium-era Cathedral and the kind of 80s-era horror-synth sound that I am a complete and total junkie for.