A Year of Music

Electric Wizard’s Witchcult Today sounds, on record, like Bardo Pond used to sound live. Which is to say Witchcult Today is very good indeed, if not quite the monolithic monster of Satanic fuzz that, say, Dopethrone was. Which is also to say there was a time when Bardo Pond would come on stage looking like a bunch of scruffy MIT grads plus some random hippie chick they rousted out of the Haight and proceed to bludgeon the crowd half to death with some of the heaviest music ever played.

When I saw Bardo Pond play Terrastock in 1998, I swear the air started to congeal. That was the first time I really understood on a gut level why it’s called “heavy metal” (technically Bardo Pond aren’t a metal band, but songs like “Tommy Gun Angel” and “This Time (So Fucked)” are basically Jesu, made years before Justin Broadrick got his new religion). You can get some idea of what Bardo Pond were like live back then here, but listening to this is sort of like watching a phonecam recording of really hot sex. It gets the idea across while being entirely inadequate.