Seasons of the Wolf

Seasons of the Wolf should be renowned the world over as one of the greatest bands in the world, but as the laws of music would have it, I guess they don’t jump on enough trends and have a hot enough lead singer for that. But for the weird cult among us who love the style pioneered by Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult back in the day, this band is the real shit. I’m going to review all their albums in order, starting with this one, to show the clear progression of their work, and this is their self-titled debut all the way back from the depths of the 90s.

To understand this band, you have to kind of put yourself in a certain mindset. Seasons of the Wolf is an 80s metal band that gigged on the same street as Atheist and Crimson Glory back in the day, but their actual sound goes back even further, digging deep into the primordial ooze of sludgy riffing and wailing, nasally vocals that produced such bands as Pagan Altar and Manilla Road a decade prior. So they’re an 80s band releasing an album in the 90s, that calls back to the 70s. Lots of bands do this shit now, but those are all a bunch of kids who grew up when death metal was getting big – this is the real deal; a true retro band out of time, a misplaced weird traveler of the cosmos.

The music here is pretty basic heavy metal riffs from guitar extraordinaire Skully, laid over with trippy keys and the jagged wail of vocalist Wes Waddell. This is the basis for all their albums, and with every album that followed the band would expand on it, introduce new elements and ideas and advance their songwriting to become more epic and larger than life. If there’s a fault to this debut, it’s that it’s comparably scant – there are only six real songs on this, and while they’re all very good, none of them really stretch the band’s legs and show what they can do.

I’d still say this is worth getting anyway though. Even if only for the awesomely occult chanting chorus on “October Moon,” the hooky as fuck “Misty Shades of Green” and the seven-minute doom adventure of “Electric Dimension.” Other songs like “Victim of Darkness” and “Long Cold Winter” are good but much more straightforward, a direction which the band would leave behind later. They’re more modern sounding tunes that recall Metal Church or Helstar more than the trippy, occult rocking doom and gloom of their more idiosyncratic material – a direction I’m eternally thankful they chose instead.

Overall this is just the beginning for Seasons of the Wolf. The safer nature of the songwriting is excusable because it’s just the band beginning to stretch their legs – they haven’t begun to really experiment yet. While this isn’t as essential as later albums, it’s still a killer back-to-basics metal album that stands proud among other 90s and early 2000s metal monoliths from bands like Psychotic Waltz, Slough Feg and Slauter Xstroyes. Get it.