Psychedelic Witchcraft - A Psychedelic Sabbath

Florence's Psychedelic Witchcraft were formed in 2015 from an idea by vocalist Virginia Monti. A devotee of psychedelic rock, blues, occultism and Sixties-and-Seventies horror cinema — in particular the unforgettable Hammer Film classics — Monti set out to build a band whose sound would be close to those groups who, from the late Sixties onward, enriched the lysergic atmospheres of Jefferson Airplane with horror settings populated by witches, vampires and creatures of the night. In short, she gravitated towards bands like Coven, Black Widow or Sam Gopal, with distorted hard rock guitars and occasional doom touches.

Virginia Monti has everything it takes to be a sort of Italian alter ego of Coven's Jinx Dawson, both for her powerful, versatile voice and for her charismatic stage presence, which wouldn't look out of place as a vampire in Christopher Lee's Dracula or as a witch in Mario Bava's La maschera del demonio. She is joined by Riccardo Giuffrè on bass, Jacopo Fallai on guitar and Mirko Buia on drums, who help provide a sturdy base of psychedelic rock-blues, with a genuinely surprising ease at finding interesting, engaging melodies and an attitude that seeks out the most authentic spirit tied to rock's origins, seen as a liberating force, with a physical approach that never slips into banality.

They debuted in 2015 with Black Magic Man, a four-track EP that caught the attention of genre fans and was reissued in 2016 with the addition of a Sam Gopal cover, "The Dark Lord." Black Magic Man reveals a band with an excellent grasp of the genre they want to explore, managing — even within a clearly vintage context — to always sound like themselves, never a mere clone. The video for the title track, inspired by Jesus Franco's 1971 film "She Killed In Ecstasy," is particularly striking.

In 2016 they released their debut LP, reaching full maturity and total command of their own means. The Vision, continuing in a heavy-psych-rock vein with pronounced esoteric overtones, rides typically seventies sounds with assurance and a personal style, across nine tracks that polish up a now thoroughly historicized sonic world. The taste for rediscovering and reappraising a bygone era persists, never contaminated by anything later than the early Seventies. All the riffs, starting with tracks like "A Creature" or "Different," sound very similar to those on the first EP. The intro to "Witches Arise" can't help but recall Black Sabbath's debut album, just as "Demon Liar," in its harshness and acid solos, plunges us into the most energetic heavy-psych.

The other tracks continue in a similar direction, with the exception of the ballad "The Only One That Knows," the stoner-rock of "War" and the remarkable acid-rock of closer "Magic Hour Blues," an excellent, highly psychedelic blues, stretched-out and nostalgic, that would make Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead happy. This last track in particular represents, in several respects, their peak, with the potential to bring the blues to new generations, thanks to a magnificent performance from guitarist Jacopo Fallai and Virginia Monti's singing at its very best. Just as important, the hypnotic video confirms Monti's own charisma, adding to the power of "Magic Hour Blues."

In 2017 Monti produced an album with doom-stoner band Dead Witches (Ouija), while for Psychedelic Witchcraft it was time for a new EP, Magic Rites And Spell, featuring three new tracks, a Blue Oyster Cult cover and the four tracks from the first EP. This collection foreshadowed Sound Of The Wind, which, amid monolithic psych and stoner riffs, shows a slight shift in the Florentine quartet's style; a greater concentration of energy and power and fewer lysergic urges, which we could sum up as "more Black Sabbath and fewer hypnotic Grateful Dead-style rides."

After a brief intro ("Maat") we land straight in the heart of the imposing riff of "Lords Of The War," a classic track somewhere between Black Sabbath and psychedelic blues, further enriched by refreshingly unobvious anti-militarist lyrics. Together with "Rising On The Edge" — both presented with fine official videos — these tracks, for their power, communicativeness and immediacy, represent a perfect example of the Florentines' potential.

"Turn Me On" and "Sin Of Mine" quite clearly recall Led Zeppelin's hard blues, while the powerful "Wild We Go" — with a cinematic intro — is a solid piece of hard rock with a mighty finale, centred on the importance of always staying true to yourself, whatever happens. The title track, on the other hand, is a somewhat too calligraphic clone of Jefferson Airplane's masterpiece "White Rabbit."

Engaging keyboard sounds are added to the chaos of "The Warrens," dedicated to the demonologist couple Ed and Lorraine Warren, while the two closing tracks — "Let Me Be Myself" and the instrumental "Horizons" — represent, together with the singles from which the two official videos are drawn, the best of the album. The former is a classic, stretched-out psychedelic blues, similar to the gorgeous "Magic Hour Blues" from the first album, the latter is the most fluid, liberating moment on the LP, a true flight of notes free of rigid structures, introduced by a brief piano pattern.

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