Electric Wizard is a heavy-metal band formed in Britain by singer and guitarist Jus Oborn in 1993. Electric Wizard (Rise Above, 1995) was a revelation: super-heavy nightmares like Stone Magnet and Behemoth, space-rock cavalcades like Mountains Of Mars, lengthy monoliths of depressed brooding like Electric Wizards and Wooden Pipe. The holy triad of stoner-rock (Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer and Hawkwind) was bent to blaspheme cerimonies of utter nihilism. The result sounded closer to early Swans than to heavy-metal.
The single Chrono-Naut (Man's Ruin, 1997) is a lengthy suite that rehashes all possible stereotypes of space-rock, stoner-rock and doom-metal; and Supercoven/ Burnout (Bad Acid, 1998) offers another half an hour of psychedelic doom-metal (this time a truly original work of art).
Come My Fanatics (Rise Above, 1999) contains six lengthy pieces. After you listen to Return Trip, Solarian 13 and especially Ivixor B, you will feel like you have been to hell.
Without the slightest concession to the mainstream, Electric Wizard returned immediately with an even heavier and spacier album, Dopethrone (MUsic Cartel, 2000), is a sheer overload of bad vibrations the erupts evil nebulae of slow-burning magma like Vinum Sabbathi, Funeralopolis, Dopethrone.
The band that invented baroque stoner-rock crafts six more slowly grinding dirges on the impeccably produced Let Us Prey (Music Cartel, 2002). In between the super-doomy A Chosen Few and Priestess Of Mars, Electric Wizard manages to unravel the ten-minute Master Of Alchemy and the nine-minute The Outsider, two suites that owe as much to Black Sabbath as to progressive-rock. The elegy Night Of The Shape could be on King Crimson's first album. While formulaic to the last note, A Chosen Few and The Outsider are each an aural sculpture of ugly, deep, slow sounds.
