Seeking high adventure on the internet last year I stepped into the aimless void that is the world wide web with an unusual clarity of purpose. Long had it been since my soul had been stirred… No, this is not that sort of stirring internet adventure… Something was missing from my life – the call of the ancient metal gods was upon me. Little did I know that the answer to my metal prayers was within my grasp. For upon that fateful night amid relatively mild seasonal temperatures in a non-descript backwater of the internet, I would discover magic (…er, Magic Circle, that is).
Magic Circle is a band that won’t stay hidden for much longer. Tagged as a doom band – and I can see why on the strength of the majority of the first album – the magic appeal of Magic Circle is much more broad than that, as they have proved even more so on their latest release. The band’s 2013 debut, I was to discover, was one of those releases which sounds more like an outpouring of emotion than music. A future classic helped along, in no insignificant manner, by the soaring vocal rush of Brendan Radigan – the experience was like discovering metal all over again.
The original thrill of 70s Sabbath and Led Zeppelin combined with all those bands from the 1980s that I will forever think of all ‘proper’ metal bands – Heavy Load, Omen, Tyrant, Manila Road and maybe even 1980s ‘heroic’-era Manowar. While the track Rapture – a showcase for Radigan’s talents if ever there was one – was all-out Zep meets 1980s speed metal. But there’s also a power and vibrancy to the core doom tracks that issues forth with a similar exhilaration that rose from the dour, crushing Sabbath chords and mournful but thoroughly uplifting vibes of Ozzy Osbourne.
In short – the debut Magic Circle album was a moment of sheer heavy metal bliss trapped in time. I did wonder whether these Americans would ever get round to releasing a second one – especially given the members seem to have a dozen other ongoing bands in motion. But you can’t keep a good thing down, it seems, and it’s good to see them turning up on a decent label like 20 Buck Spin. The follow up is satisfyingly more expansive and triumphant – I say satisfying because departing from the magnetic grip of that original intense experience was always going to be tricky.
Journey Blind maintains those heavy, distorted chords and the sound of times past but somehow manages to detach itself further from the doom mother ship taking Magic Circle into an orbit all of its own. The title track is so huge it’s hard not to imagine it being performed on a festival stage. I’ve no idea if that’s where the band envisages itself – these guys seemed to have specialised in fairly small venue outfits whose other projects include hardcore bands The Rival Mob and Mind Eraser; metal punk Battle Ruins and the possibly-even-better-than-Magic-Circle-side-project Stone Dagger (please do a Stone Dagger album, please). But the chugging second track The Damned Man which ups the pace before falling into a gravitational, cascading doom fest does a decent job of trying to upstage the first.
Tracks like Lightning Cage are drenched in nods to Ozzy-era Sabbath but unlike other bands – and I could name dozens of proto doom and stoner rock bands here that suffer from being stuck fast in their Sab-worship – Magic Circle effortlessly haul themselves out of the heavy pull and into adventures new. Grand Deceivers is pure Magic Circle while Ghosts of the Southern Front is this album’s Radigan showcase. There are a few intentional doom-isms here which you’ve heard a thousand times before but this is a band which can effortlessly elevate, carried by those crafty riffs, soaring pipes and irrepressible calls to speed, to reach its own altitudes at an instant.
Magic Circle has taken all the best bits of doom reworked it into a new entity – bursting at the seams with the band’s creative energy. It’s not just the confidence of a band that knows it can take things to uncommon levels because of the lead singer’s vocal talent – more a band that can’t get enough of channelling its own talent and love of heavy metal. Journey Blind has moved things along considerably for Magic Circle and will get them noticed. I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t appear in an awful lot of 2015 Top 10 lists come year end.
(9.5/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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