Review Summary: Sabbathmania, Part 1
It's generally agreed that Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, but recently, there’s been more acknowledgment of Coven’s role in shaping various metal tropes one year before Sabbath. Coven’s influence is often mentioned in relation to the occult rock movement. This is a strange chapter in music history, a scene that appeared in the mid-2000s and sounded and looked like what would happen if you’d mix Coven, Black Sabbath, the doomy, sludgy heavy metal bands they had inspired and a good amount of 60s-70s nostalgia, with a strong inspiration from Stevie Nicks’s witchy vibes and Ann Wilson’s singing style. It’s another clear phenomenon of serial imitations in music, which is why it’s time for a new series of -mania reviews.
Today’s band Purson has most of the characteristics associated with occult rock, with their demonic name, their old school hippie-witch look and their curious, psychedelic sound. They’re not the first occult rock band ever, but they’re one of the first acts I noticed being associated with that scene and receiving a lot of praise in the metal press. Is their debut album “The Circle and the Blue Door” worth the hype? Indeed, if you like retro rock with an odd, magical atmosphere, you’ll find a lot to enjoy.
If the eerie, lullaby-like, “Wake up Sleepy Head” grips you immediately, you’ll like most of what you’ll hear after that. But that’s just an intro, the first proper track that really showcases the album’s sound is “The Contract”, with its catchy “Go, oh oh!” chorus, funny psychedelic guitar effect, its mellow atmosphere with a dark undertone. It has all the good things about 60s psychedelic music.
Other tracks keep using similar amounts of the same guitar effects, often to create an old-timey feel, like on the melancholic folk ballad of “Sailor’s Wife’s Lament”, complete with music boxes and seagulls calling. Or the tormented “Tempest and the Tide”, with its melancholic singing and violins, slightly operatic background vocals on the chorus and weird noises in the middle.
Sometimes, it creates some catchy rock tracks, like “Well Spoiled Machine” and its irresistible melody and strange riffs. Or of course, the single “Leaning on a Bear”, with its cool riffs and keyboards, and adorable video showing a fight between lion and bear puppets. But the band isn’t singing about teddy bears, it should be read as a metaphor for demons and greedy record labels, which is one of their favorite topics, aside from magic.
For a bad example of that, you have the fairly boring ballad “Tragic Catastrophe”, about a young man who worships “classic rock” acts of the past like gods, but he’s bluntly told that he can’t have a career playing that kind of music, which is too bad because the old stuff is supposedly so much more authentic than today’s super-fake music. The usual born-in-the-wrong-generation rant. Let’s contrast that with a good song about magic, like the energetic and fun “Mavericks and Mystics”. Out of the entire album, it’s the song that sounds the most like something from “Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reap Souls” or “Black Sabbath”. Well, that and the distorted riffs of “Saphire Ward”.
However, the track where the band really go wild with their psychedelia and creepy undertones would be my personal favorite, “Spiderwood Farm”, with its heavier, more threatening riff that repeats the haunting melody that Rosalie Cunningham is also singing, as she spins a tale of a mysterious cult who still haunt an abandoned farm. It’s an enjoyably eerie track, maybe more of a cartoonish, Halloween episode type of horror than something truly scary but it still manages to give you a strange, uneasy feeling. It’s catchy and unsettling at the same time, basically the entire essence of occult rock.
This track and “Rocking Horse”, have a slow, dark feel that could be inspired by our 2 creators of metal, but also by the entire goth music movement. It has been noted that Rosalie’s voice sounds a lot like Siouxsie Sioux, and her style seems to have a distinct goth influence, which proves how Purson, and maybe the entire occult rock scene, actually have a fairly varied sound with many inspirations. All occult rock bands have a similar basis but put their own spin on it. Purson’s own thing is their mellow, delicately eerie sound that’s closer to the rock end of occult rock, lightly intersecting with goth rock, than to heavy or doom metal. As we’ll see, it helps them stand out from other occult rock bands, and sound closer to Coven than many of them do.
So I’d say they were a pretty good, fairly original sabbathmaniac, at least for a short time. They only made one other album after this, where they ditched the occult vibe and just made some generic vaguely retro rock, until Rosalie left for a solo career. She seems to be the only band member who had a career after Purson. That’s kind of sad for a band that was once hailed as the next big thing, both by people who liked occult rock and those who didn’t. But even though their career would not last, and the occult rock trend wouldn’t either, they still had the time to make some good songs. Making a debut album that’s so good from beginning to end, with some dull and repetitive parts but nothing really bad, that’s already quite an accomplishment that not many bands are capable of. And this is why this album at least is worth the hype 14 years later, why it deserves to be remembered.
