Come My Fanatics…

There is a moment at the beginning of Return Trip where Electric Wizard give you just enough time to reconsider.

Feedback.

Noise.

A count-in.

You could leave.

Nobody would judge you.

Then the riff arrives.

And Come My Fanatics… begins trying to push your house several inches deeper into the foundations.

Electric Wizard had already made an album before this. Their self-titled debut established the basic ingredients: Black Sabbath, doom, distortion and the firm belief that guitars generally improve as they become less capable of reproducing identifiable notes.

But the band themselves weren’t particularly satisfied with it.

Jus Oborn would later describe that first record as essentially a glorified demo. They were inexperienced in the studio, much of the material stretched back to his previous bands, and most importantly, it didn’t sound like the thing they could apparently already hear inside their heads.

So they tried again.

This time they got it.

Unfortunately for the structural integrity of southern England, the thing inside their heads was Come My Fanatics…

Return Trip is ten minutes long.

It feels heavier than most buildings.

Oborn’s guitar tone isn’t merely distorted. Distortion suggests there was once a recognisable guitar signal underneath and something unfortunate happened to it.

This has gone considerably further.

The guitar seems to arrive as a physical substance.

Tim Bagshaw’s bass lurks underneath it, Mark Greening’s drums drag everything forward, and Oborn’s voice sounds as though somebody accidentally left a microphone switched on while an exorcism was taking place in the next room.

This is important because Electric Wizard aren’t simply slow.

Plenty of bands can play slowly.

You can do that accidentally.

What Electric Wizard understood was that slowness could create weight.

Every gap between Greening’s hits gives the riff more room to loom over you. Every sustained chord gets slightly more unpleasant the longer it hangs around.

By the time Return Trip eventually finishes, MERINGUE! had developed a minor subsidence problem.

Then comes Wizard in Black.

If Return Trip introduces the sound of the record, Wizard in Black demonstrates that there are actual songs buried underneath it.

Good ones.

Very good ones.

There is obviously Sabbath DNA everywhere here. Electric Wizard weren’t exactly attempting to conceal the body. Even their name was assembled from Electric Funeral and The Wizard.

Subtlety had left the building several years earlier.

But Come My Fanatics… doesn’t sound like three men doing Black Sabbath cosplay.

Sabbath is the starting point.

Electric Wizard take that primitive doom language and feed it through psychedelia, space rock, noise and enough sonic filth that eventually it becomes something distinctly their own.

Which brings us to Doom-Mantia.

Nine minutes.

Barely a conventional song.

Absolutely magnificent.

A hypnotic riff circles endlessly while effects and noise drift around it. The whole thing feels less composed than summoned.

And this is where Come My Fanatics… reveals what makes it more interesting than simply being VERY FUCKING HEAVY: THE ALBUM.

It’s psychedelic.

Not flowers-and-kaleidoscopes psychedelic.

There will be no sitar.

Nobody is painting a Volkswagen.

This is psychedelia after somebody has turned the lights off and locked the door.

The record doesn’t invite you to explore another dimension.

It suggests another dimension has noticed you.

Then Ivixor B/Phase Inducer abandons conventional doom almost entirely.

Its strange electronic opening reportedly came from the band messing around with a sampler in the studio. They didn’t particularly care for the music associated with the equipment, but they liked what could be done with the sounds.

Which is an admirably Electric Wizard approach to technological innovation.

WHAT’S THIS BUTTON DO?

ominous electronic noise

KEEP IT.

The instrumental becomes a great decompression chamber in the middle of the record. After the suffocating first half, suddenly we’re drifting through space.

Admittedly, it is Electric Wizard’s version of space.

So something terrible probably lives there.

Son of Nothing brings the riffs back.

And by now something else becomes apparent.

Mark Greening is absolutely essential to this record.

With guitar and bass occupying approximately 97% of the available atmosphere, the drums could easily have disappeared underneath everything.

Instead Greening gives the songs shape.

He doesn’t fight the riffs.

He waits.

Then hits.

Then waits again.

It gives the music that enormous lurching momentum which countless doom bands subsequently discovered is much harder to reproduce than simply tuning your guitar down until the strings resemble washing lines.

The closing Solarian 13 then leaves vocals behind altogether.

By conventional album sequencing logic, ending your record with an instrumental psychedelic space-doom excursion might seem slightly indulgent.

By this point conventional album sequencing logic has been dead for approximately 45 minutes.

Leave it there.

Nobody touch it.

What is extraordinary about Come My Fanatics… today is that Electric Wizard would make their most famous album after this.

Dopethrone arrived in 2000 and became the record most commonly associated with the band.

And Dopethrone deserves that reputation.

But there remains an argument — whispered in dark rooms by people with very large speaker cabinets — that Electric Wizard were never heavier than this.

Come My Fanatics… is less refined.

Less iconic.

Less complete, perhaps.

And somehow that makes it worse.

In the best possible way.

It sounds like Electric Wizard have discovered something they don’t entirely understand yet.

Their debut had contained the ingredients.

Here, suddenly, the proportions are catastrophically correct.

The guitar tone.

The enormous bass.

Greening’s drums.

The samples.

The horror.

The psychedelia.

The riffs that move at approximately the same speed as continental drift.

Everything locks together.

Electric Wizard would develop it further.

They would make bigger records.

They would become one of the defining names in doom.

But Come My Fanatics… captures the precise moment three musicians stopped sounding like their influences and started sounding like Electric Wizard.

And they did it in Dorset.

Dorset.

Home of picturesque villages, Jurassic coastline and apparently THE FUCKING ABYSS.

Nobody saw that coming.