review: Book of Wyrms

Book of Wyrms

Remythologizer

Twin Earth Records/Stoner Witch Records

23 August 2019

Don’t throw away your happy pills, friend. You will still be needing them. The North Carolina, USA band takes the 1970s hard-blues sound of heavy rock, and maintains the pace steady as downer rock doom with a clear psychedelic or space rock overall spirit. The result is slow, doom-and-gloom songs as the fundamental style. Despite the above scary description, the music is not extreme metal, and way more accessible than the super slow doom, sludge and drone of today’s doom at the most extreme end of the spectrum. Book of Wyrms has everything that old hippies would have liked, a fan of the Zep/Sabbath/Purple/Heep/Doors/IronButterflyJeffersonAirplane psychedelic music would be at home with this bluesy slow heavy spacey rock

The band prefers to milk the melodies for all that they are worth. In practical terms, it means, relax and don’t be in a hurry to hear fast or uptempo music because this is all about keeping things simple and intelligible as a comfortable pace of slow motion to let the listener hear the grooves and winding ways of the guitar slowly churning out vibrations. Logically, in this style the band allows the rhythm section to be heard loud and clear. The trippy synthesizer work is important on this recording in order to have the space rock feeling. The singing voice comes across as too thin. Perhaps it is too low in the mix. Maybe the problem lies elsewhere. Overall, however, die-hard fans of oldie heavy rock and space rock are the intended audience. Think 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, and maybe 1971, but probably no later than 1972, for the groovy times of peace, love and protest.

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