Album Review: Sorceress- Beneath the Mountain (w/bonus Myths of the Mountain Rumor Table!)
I’m coming to it after its top-notch remaster (“sumptuous” comes to mind), so I couldn’t tell you how it hit at the time of its first release. But 15 years later, it’s no bygone glory, it holds up. It’s transportative. It’s engrossing. It’s heavy and smooth at the same time, with a rare sense of deliberate pacing and depth throughout the album. Doom, in my opinion, is at its best when it aims for the album as a whole, and Beneath The Mountain is one such album. Prepare for glory. This is a hell of a record!
Extra little disclosure afterthought: I make no $ from this blog but I did receive gifts from Todd of King Volume when we hung out in his store.
He personally recommended the album as a favorite and I love it, so if that means I'm biased then there you go I guess?
The texture of the sounds is loud but also muted, minor tonalities but not maudlin. The 6 tracks are well composed and masterfully sequenced, with none asserting themselves as “the main event” until near the end with the closer tracks Anar and Beneath the Mountain itself, nor any weak songs in the middle. There is a perplexing issue with the vinyl, which is that the tracklist is misprinted. The sleeve and the center stamps have different listings from one another, with the center stamps being the correct one. There’s also the slightly strange runtime of 10ish minutes for sides A & B, but 20ish for C & D. I’m not a vinyl mastering engineer though, and the music is utterly top-notch, so whatever. It’s rare in my experience for a doom album to be so well put together and engaging, especially with as much variety as you’ll hear spinning this record.
Nine Muses, the second track, takes an immediate descent into darker, hellish vocals and slow paced, quiet, yet heavy drums and riffs, then ends with a blowing wind and some strange, low, psychedelic audio warbling, helpfully letting you know it’s time to flip the record… something that the album as a whole does, joining together its different sections, and never so much giving a break as much as keeping you in thrall to the flow that it creates.
On side B …Of the Trees hits a more traditional stoner doom groove, but evolves at the 6 minute mark into a strangely sludgy, disorienting other form, almost like some kind of Romanian waltz. The band is fucking with you-- 20 minutes into your high something comes that you are not expecting, but you fucking love it anyway-- and then on side C Black Acid Mother transitions back to a raging, psychedelic shredfest that would get Matt Pike eager to release a split record with them if he heard it.
The eponymous closer, hits a Sleep-y energy, circling back around periodically to the energetic jam of Wolves of Asgard, pausing, building, slowing down to lure you into heavy headbanging riffs. After 11 minutes of basically stoner metal heaven, it fades into wind and comes back, several minutes later with a backwards and downtuned little hidden track which I wish I could hear 10 minutes of too, and then gently fades out again.
Sorceress didn’t get their due- it was sort of a side project, a phase in between bands, but it’s worthy of a greater saga than it received. I’m not saying quit Mizmor, but the alternate universe where Sorceress continued to release excellent pseudo-traditional psychedelic doom is tantalizing. It is exactly what their bandcamp page says- a hidden gem, a forgotten near-masterpiece that will hook you and make you yearn for a different kind of doom, bang your head, and live in another world while the record spins.
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