The final album we will release on 20 Buck Spin in 2015 will be the 2nd LP of Doomed Heavy Metal from Magic Circle, entitled ‘Journey Blind’. This is the perfect album to end the busy year we’ve had and goes without saying it’s one of the best.
As per usual it will release via CD / Digital first on November 20th, followed shortly thereafter by the vinyl edition. And yes, that is Joe Petagno cover art.
Tracklist:
1. Journey Blind
2. The Damned Man
3. A Ballad For The Vultures
4. Lightning Cage
5. Ghosts Of The Southern Front
6. Grand Deceivers
7. Antediluvian
Who said anything about running out of ideas? The stubborn ones were born to linger, to nose out newer, more subtle permutations with the help from a few ragged fucks willing to practice them. Magic Circle mutt roll in Heavy Metal whatness, striking a balance with the pituitary culture it begat, and the tunes it jacked out. Suburban drag races. Basement bum wine scrum. Every collective thought burnt into a dirty tape dub of Mob Rules.
Sabbath, especially in its later incarnations, hulks ephemerally among all openings, rests, and codas. When Chris Corry and Dan Ducas’ guitars aren’t jelly-legging around Iommi, they’re rekindling “Neon Knights,” brandishing “Die Young” credo. Meanwhile, Q clubs the kit like a drunken Ginger Baker. Brendan Radigan stakes big, black flag in vocal territory long occupied by Saint Vitus, Saxon, Armored Saint, and Trouble. Bassist Justin DeTore alternates creepy crawl and thunder word belch, laying yoke over each tune and driving them predjudicially underground.
But motherfuck simply “sounding” like these bands. Magic Circle celebrates them, and in doing so honors the form they have found. It’s Heavy Metal. Hit hard. Write riffs that clack along like rustbucket tanks into perpetuity. “Play” bass in ways that make you at once inseparable from every punch the drummer lands, and also ghosts every riff---working beneath, between, behind the rhythm. Sing that fucking story as every ancient did their Homer. It means something. It stands for something. Bring that to the tape.
And so Magic Circle does. Tunes are rude, viscious. Some lumber ominously along, bare-fisting the downbeat through riffs risen from basements held in the odors of stale beer, mold, and want. Others stuff the song’s shape with directional changes---tipping a cap to Trouble and Saint Vitus via Sabbath. All the dots are easily connected. There’s no sport there. But, in lieu of refinement, we get an honest reckoning: Magic Circle is a band (quickly) becoming. Through the web of influence and itchy, artistic compulsion they’ve found savage and ultimately promising ways of reanimating long since taxidermied forms.
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