Lucifer Rising 2013
Back up on their feet, Italian horror clangers do the mortal disco on yer graves.
Over the years, there’s been a lot of attempts to marry heavy riffs to dance grooves, but only a few of them sound as successful as this album. Save for execrable name – outsiders will hardly bother to find out that SS are singer Steve Sylvester’s initials – this band, charging on since 1977, know how to be magnetic, and here they serve up a dozen of tracks that are are infectious as black plague. Discarding some songs, first of all the 10-minute epic “The Song Of Adoration” where the quintet lapse into the orchestra-laden power tropes, might have resulted in a stronger impact, yet one could hardly resist the catchy, electronica-tinctured beat of opener “Revived” or “Dionysus.”
In such a context the compression on Bozo Wolff’s sometimes motorik drums come more organic than in the classic metal territory explored in the likes of “The Darkest Night” – on the more refined grounds, “The Devil’s Graal” with Al Denoble’s guitar delivering an exquisite solo over Glenn Strange’s bass bedrock, is as punchy as it gets. But if it was a Saturday Night Fever, “Star In Sight,” adorned with female voices and piano, would send Travolta in a zombie trance, and the “Bad Luck” rock ‘n’ rolling would have Alice Cooper’s fans in stitches. Looks like resurrection is fun indeed.
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