Summon the End / Mind Blowing Trip!!!

The Death Wheelers – Mind Blowing Trip (2015-2016)
Witchstone – Summon the End (2016)


The Death Wheelers is Max Tremblay’s counterpart project to Strange Broue. While his other band plays huge doom/stoner vocals hugely inspired by Electric Wisard and the likes, this project is purely instrumental and like a bunch of Hells Angels high on satanic cocaine, it rocks hard. The songs are short burners with huge, thick bass lines and heavy as fuck doom riffs. There’s also many B movie (or just cult ones like Easy Rider on “Freewheelin’”) samples opening the tracks giving the Death Wheelers a welcoming nostalgic and vintage feel. There’s this fun atmosphere, perfect for driving at night and it’s almost as good as Karma to Burn, which are the masters of instrumental stoner metal in my opinion.

Actually released last year, the then sold out EP is now part of this split release with Witchstone and their two new tracks. I wanted to review their first full length released in 2014 so tackling this split is a pretty good opportunity to write about them. The quartet from Calgary is widely different than The Death Wheelers in the way they doom their metal. The two long pieces are full of old school horror doom influences with both venomous sludgey vocals and clean ones, super cool psychedelic guitar solos and slow riffs. The mix of harsh vocals and a musical background based mostly on doom/rock isn’t quite dichotomic (check out Black Magick SS for rock with harsh vox!), it really fits the occult mood they’re going for. Both songs are really damn good, they’re able to be atmospheric without forgetting to write compelling riffs.

This is a good split even though both bands don’t really fit together quite well. I think it should had been marketed differently but that’s just me! Anyhow, both sides are pretty damn solid examples of how good the Canadian doom/stoner/whatever scene is.

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