On my way back from Macau last summer I had a 15-hour layover in San Francisco. I dropped my bags off at the left luggage desk and took the train into the Mission, where, among other things, I loitered at Borderlands Books (and missed meeting Nick Mamatas by a few scant minutes), ate vegan food and drank beer that wasn't Tsingtao or San Miguel at Gracias Madre, and visited Aquarius Records for the second and equally triumphant time.
As you might expect, I found a number of albums worth purchasing at Aquarius, home of killer poetic album descriptions, and and the staff was kind enough to pack 'em up and ship 'em to Texas for me. Among those albums was Tarot's The Warrior's Spell, a compilation of their cassette-only demos (something I didn't know at the time, but would come into play when, a year later, they'd release their first full-length: see below). Like so many underground metal releases, the album art struck me as what I can only describe as amateurishly perfect. The title itself had the same effect: as a lifelong D&D player, the notion of a "warrior's spell" was just wrong, since spells are strictly within the purview of magic-users and (ugh) clerics, but it sounds cool, so who cares?
Here's the write-up from Aquarius Records:
The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future...I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!
The Aquarius dudes nail the feel of the music itself, but like the Astral Rune Bastards record I wrote about a while back, listening to Tarot conjures up more than lyric-related imagery. The Warrior's Spell, less polished than the full-length Reflections (itself quite faithful to the analog sound of its influences, even though it was recorded with modern equipment), is particularly good at evoking the sort of scenes that one might imagine giving birth to the music itself. It's more than nostalgia for the days of '70s metal and hard rock, which neither I nor the members of Tarot ever experienced. It's the feeling of letting your imagination wander deeper and deeper into the fantastic as you kick back in your bedroom or basement with some albums borrowed from your buddy (say, Uriah Heep's The Magician's Birthday, like Aquarius Records suggested, or Reflections, Tarot's newest), a stack of Moorcock and Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, the first edition AD&D Players Handbook, and maybe a joint or two.
People have been enjoying this kind of experience, with any number of aesthetic tweaks, forever, and it's one I continue to seek out. Heavy metal and the other trappings I mentioned above remain my primary method of doing so, and Tarot's ability to provide a killer soundtrack means that I can spend many an afternoon or evening lost in contemplation of not just wizards, fate, solitude, but a version of the 1970s that never quite was, or maybe just bled across time and space into our present day and the minds of a few dudes from Tasmania.
Check out Reflections here and The Warrior's Spell here, and get your fix of sweet riffs and organ lines. Don't forget to eyeball that album art while you're at it.
Later!
D.A.S.
