(Andy Synn finds love in the hyperdrive all over again with Witch Ripper)
Let me begin by telling you a little story I don’t think I’ve shared before.
I’ve been a big fan of Seattle-based Prog-Metal maestros Witch Ripper for some time now – I first wrote very positively about their first album, Homestead in 2018, and lavished even more praise on 2023’s outstanding, album of the year contender, The Flight After the Fall – but, due to the exorbitant postage costs involved in shipping anything from the US over the last few years, getting a hold of either of these albums in physical form proved to be prohibitively expensive.
Thankfully I’d become friendly with the band’s vocalist/guitarist, Curtis Parker during this time, and while I was in Seattle for Northwest Terror Fest in 2024 (tickets for this year’s edition still on sale, btw) he very kindly offered to hand-deliver copies of both record’s to me at my hotel, an offer which I duly accepted.
But here’s the thing – and the thing that Curtis himself didn’t know (but absolutely will after this) – I thought I was getting CD version of both albums, so when he walked around the corner with two LPs in hand, well… let’s just say I was very surprised, but tried not to show it, even though I had no idea how was going to get these two pieces of vinyl back to the UK without breaking them.
Thankfully I was ultimately able to transport them both home safely (and then, not long after, track down affordable copies of both albums on CD as well) and they now sit proudly on my vinyl shelf as part of my small, but much-loved, LP collection, and I’m hopefully going to add their excellent new album, Through the Hourglass, to the shelf right alongside them very soon.
As much as Through the Hourglass is intended to continue the story – both lyrically (prepare yourselves for another tale of cosmic calamity and time-loops gone wrong) and musically (to the point where the opening intro track cleverly references the central melodic refrain of “Everlasting in Retrograde”) – the band began writing for themselves on The Flight After the Fall, it would be a mistake to simply assume that Witch Ripper have just written the same album all over again.
Sure, many of the same sonic touch-stones are still valid – the band’s sound, at its core, still marries the proggy groove and punchy swagger of early Baroness and break-out-era Mastodon with the grandiose, almost operatic, sci-fi songwriting of Muse and Coheed and Cambria – but overall Through the Hourglass comes across as a noticeably darker and moodier (though still gloriously majestic) album than its predecessor.
This becomes particularly evident once the record really hits its stride on “Echoes and Dust”, where the heftier, sludgier side of the band’s identity starts to come to the fore a little more, establishing a different, but still complementary energy – the interplay between riffs and rhythms (with a great deal of credit going to drummer Joe Eck’s impressive performance behind the kit) really sparks on this one – that firmly establishes this as the next chaper of the story, rather than just a retread of the previous one.
I’ll grant you that it does take it a little while to get there… “The Portal”, despite a pleasingly bombastic chorus (which, at the very least, allows Parker show off his increasingly polished pipes even more), doesn’t quite have the energy the album needs to get into gear, leaving the riffier “Symmetry of the Hourglass” to feel like it possibly should have been the album’s real opener… but once it fully locks in it’s all systems go all the way to the end.
“The Clock Queen”, in particular (which focuses on the eponymous antagonist of the story) goes big in a manner that reminds you that Witch Ripper also count the likes of Queen and Zeppelin as influences, all strutting, staccato riffs and winding leads, hefty, head-bangable hooks and intricately proggy instrumental passages, while “Proxima Centauri” – in a rather ingenious move – inverts the album’s polarity to explore a calmer, quieter approach that slowly but surely builds to an unashamedly grandiose crescendo.
Let me tell you, while Through the Hourglass (which comes out this Friday) might not be set to dethrone The Flight After the Fall in my affections any time soon – though the brooding, cinematic brilliance of multi-faceted closer “The Spiral Eye” is one that’s sure to keep me, and likely other listeners as well, coming back for more – it should, if there’s any justice in the world, strap a rocket to the band’s back and propel them to a higher level where they can reach an even bigger audience.
I just hope they don’t forget about us little people down here once they’re up there playing amongst the stars!