2016
Earlier we delved into diabolical female-fronted rock bands whose music, laced with references to arcane arts, pagan rituals, and Luciferian principles, conjure doom-laden dalliances with the dark one.
We explored the alchemical doom of Jex Thoth, the menacing spell woven by Lucifer, the progressive flute-driven Blood Ceremony, the folk psychedelia of Purson, and the acid-rock magic of Jess and the Ancient Ones. Naturally, these sirens’ songs planted a Satanic seed in our readers’ souls. A shadowy need was thus borne, and a great cry arose for more hellish sounds from the likes of these infernal female rockers.
We live to serve, dear reader. Whether you’ve a wicked desire for dramatic vocal pyrotechnics, subdued sylvan incantations, funerary sludge, or high energy headbanging hexcraft, the following sonic shamans and seers are some of the hexiest, witchiest, badass women of occult rock.
Christian Mistress
Front woman Christine Davis’ powerful vocals rasp and howl amidst no-frills, grandiose heavy metal firepower that pays enthusiastic sonic homage to those that came before.
Ides of Gemini
Ides of Gemini, a “dream doom” trio led by the spectral vocals of Sera Timms (also of Black Mare and the now defunct Black Math Horseman) serves up hazy, lo-fi, utterly crushing despair and desperation as sung by a moody choir of dark seraphim.
Karyn Crisis’ Gospel of the Witches
Karyn Crisis’ voice –alternating between vicious, demonic growls and tender, angelic coos– is a sonic study in contrasts and is noted as being one of the most iconic in the extreme metal scene. This dynamic front-woman –a seeker, shaman, witch, and healer– blasts listeners with a bombastic atmosphere encapsulating both harmony and chaos, and songs which “twist and turn into darkness and then transmute into heartbreaking beauty and light.” To read more about the force of nature that is Karyn Crisis, check out my interview with her at Haute Macabre.
Mount Salem
Mount Salem’s sound is one of soporific yet strangely groovy sludge. Tinged with an eerie edge of mounting hysteria from vocalist Emily Kopplin’s high, mournful voice, it coalesces to conjure some nightmarishly memorable jams.
Royal Thunder
Boasting an impassioned voice howling with harrowing desperation and spitting intensity, bayou banshee Mlny Parsonz of Atlanta’s Royal Thunder brings the bluesy, southern gothic, 1970s metal darkness.
Ruby The Hatchet
Ruby The Hatchet entices the listener to revel in compelling psych rock energy, thunderous melodies, and the sullen allure of Jillian Taylor’s voice. It’s a hypnotic, hallucinogenic, headbanging invitation and one I guarantee you can’t refuse.
Sabbath Assembly
Sabbath Assembly was originally formed to proselytize “psychic liberation rather than entrapment” as it related to a doomed apocalyptic cult: the obscure religious splinter group known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Since re-imagined and reinvented, and minus the freaky liturgical pieces, they’re still serving up a strangely potent chalice of searingly dark, unearthly sounds accompanied by Jamie Meyers’ poisonously unsettling vocals.
SubRosa
There’s hauntingly powerful imagery evoked in the doom-laden balladry of Salt Lake City’s SubRosa. Vocalist Rebecca Vernon intones gloomily on themes of sorrow, struggle, and death, while guitars thickly drone and violins moan along with a dreary elegance. Notes Vernon on the funereal subject matter: “We’re into the idea of unseen forces, the unseen world. We’ve always had big questions about the way things work and a natural suspicion of artifice… The reason death is probably a natural theme for us is because it is the opposite of artifice.”
(This article was originally posted at Dirge; the site is no longer active.)
If you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?