Recommended If You Like Blood Ceremony

Very few bands “make it.” Far more toil in relative obscurity, only sometimes earning a fan base and a living wage for their art. A lot of these little-known or under-known acts, though, are the inspiration for or compatriots of those bigger acts, those bands that made it. Thus, The A.V. Club’s Recommended If You Like, where we start with a bigger band—Mumford & Sons, for example—and run down a few acts that fans might be into.

In this edition, we look at Toronto’s Blood Ceremony. The pagan metal act, fronted by singer-flautist-keyboardist Alia O’Brien, is currently supporting the Swedish doom-metal spooksters of Ghost on their North American tour. But in a lot of ways, Blood Ceremony is the more interesting band on the tour. For one thing, between its 2008 self-titled debut and last year’s excellent Living With The Ancients, the band has more material than Ghost. And Blood Ceremony’s music gestures to the dustier, more ancient corners of metaldom, where daemons, darkness, and extended flute solos are a bigger concern than speed or macho posturing.

Black Widow
When a band has great riffs—and Blood Ceremony does not want for great riffs—comparisons to Black Sabbath eventually arise. But Blood Ceremony’s sound, riff-heavy though it may be, hews closer to that of Black Widow, another English hard-rock band formed in the late ’60s. Known for its theatricality—live shows featured the mock sacrifice of a nude woman—and communing with noted witch Alex Sanders, Black Widow’s ties to the earthy and pagan roots of heavy metal are a bit more apparent than those of bands like Sabbath. The group’s exceptional 1970 LP, Sacrifice, featuring “Come To The Sabbat” (Black Widow’s trademark song, and one oft-covered by subsequent metal bands), blends thumping drums, driving organs, and guitars and, yes, flute into an intoxicating concoction of proto-metal.

Pentagram
In a 2011 interview, O’Brien noted that while Blood Ceremony is most often compared to Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull (you know, riffs meet flutes), the group that the band is “pretty much obsessed with” is Pentagram, which formed in Virginia in the early 1970s. The American doom-metal pioneers released a few singles before splitting, only to reform again in 1985 and release their first full-length album. Pentagram’s second full-length record, 1987’s Day Of Reckoning, is a classic doom-metal record, recalling contemporaries like Saint Vitus and Witchfinder General. (We also highly recommend Bedemon, the short-lived 1973 Pentagram side project, which we like just as much as Pentagram.)

Witchcraft
Blending heavy metal and psychedelic rock, Witchcraft was formed in Sweden in 2000 and conceived as hybrid of Pentagram and Roky Erickson. Though the band is more steeped in ’70s psych sounds than Blood Ceremony is, and Witchcraft seems a bit more openly nostalgic (Pitchfork even called the group “cartoony”), Witchcraft works its stoner-rock magic pretty efficiently. And even if it’s too cheeky at times, 2007’s The Alchemist remains an enjoyable psych-metal hybrid record.

The Devil’s Blood
If you’re looking for a handy trend or “movement” to jimmy Blood Ceremony into, how about female-fronted occult rock? Sure, that’s a thing. Just look at Dutch hard-rock act The Devil’s Blood, founded in 2007 by guitarist Selim Lemouchi and his sister, vocalist Farida (or, more commonly, “F”), who is known for dousing herself in stage blood while performing. Like Witchcraft, The Devil’s Blood seems more indebted to ’70s psych and prog-metal. (On some tracks, you might confuse F’s wail for that of Rush’s Geddy Lee.) But like Blood Ceremony, the group is lyrically preoccupied with the devil, darkness, and all manners of the transmundane.

Electric Wizard
One of the reasons Blood Ceremony has a stronger following in the U.K. and Europe than it does in North America is because of its stints opening for the stoner-metal dark lords of Electric Wizard over the past few years. Formed in Dorset, England in 1993, Electric Wizard is often referred to as “the heaviest band in the universe.” The band’s incredibly loud, deep, riff-heavy records combine an interest with the occult with a dorky passion for Hammer horror films and weed worship. Electric Wizard’s 2000 release, Dopethrone, is a classic of the stoner and doom metal subgenres. But the group’s more recent releases, 2007’s Witchcult Today and 2010’s Black Masses, hold up well.