ALBUM REVIEW: Deep Cuts & Shallow Graves – Bewitcher
In music, it’s never a bad thing to remember your roots and origins, and BEWITCHER are doing just that. For a full decade, the trio from Portland, Oregon have been carving out a career through little more than hard work and a fixation on producing some of the best, modern, blackened speed metal around, a sound they affectionately refer to as ‘Black Magick Metal’. As a celebration of their ten-year anniversary, the band have taken their three original demos – long out of print – and remastered them, before packaging them with previously unreleased takes, two brand new songs and a recent cover to form, to give it its full title, Deep Cuts & Shallow Graves: Ten Years Of Black Leather, Black Magic & White Hot Fucking Steel, out on November 17th via Century Media Records.
The main selling point of this compilation is undoubtedly the trio of releases that mark BEWITCHER’s genesis – 2013’s duo of first EP Satanic Panic and its follow-up Wild Blasphemy, and 2015’s Midnight Hunters. Of the ten tracks that make up this series, none of them are particularly genre-bending or groundbreaking, but they all show a band who, even at the very beginning, were adept in the art of heavy riffs, blistering tempos and an all-out metal attack. Speed ‘Til You Bleed from Midnight Hunters harks back to the infancy of thrash in the early 1980s and a certain album called Kill ‘Em All and, while slightly hokey, the title track of Wild Blasphemy opening with a backwards message is a nice tribute to when metal really WAS seen as Satanic and evil. Elsewhere, the switch from pacey riffage into a slower, almost SABBATH-like groove on Rome Is On Fire and the galloping triplets in Trial Of Swords will delight those who have lived in their denim jackets for four decades.
Of the other tracks present, the two brand new songs – Manifesting Darkness and Our Lady of Speed – are good blends of VENOM and MOTÖRHEAD, ably backed up by a cover of MÖTLEY CRÜE’s Bastard that takes the original and adds less hairspray and more metal studs. The final four tracks – demos of Harlots Of Hell and Hot Nights, Red Lights from the band’s eponymous debut album and In the Sign Of The Goat and Hedgerider from their 2013 compilation Grand Rites Of The Wicked – haven’t been given the repolishing of the other demos so sound rough in comparison and are therefore less appealing (along with being readily available elsewhere), but their inclusion will give listeners just that little extra insight into their composition, even if they’ll mainly attract attention from the completists among BEWITCHER’s rabid, tight-knit fanbase.
Compilation albums are often aimed at one of two specific audiences – the diehards looking to complete their collection, or those who wish for an introduction to a band or artist; BEWITCHER have managed to appeal to both. If you’ve been listening for a while, the chance to hear their earliest tracks in a digital form is always going to excite, while those who like their metal fast, hard and fairly traditional can pick this up and see if they’re going to find another outfit to enjoy for the foreseeable. Above all, it’s a hell of a fun listen.
Rating: 7/10
Deep Cuts & Shallow Graves is set for release on November 17th via Century Media Records.
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