It’s been about a month since the new album of Zoroaster, titled Voice of Saturn was published. In comparison to their previous ones it is more experimental and psychedelic rendering it much more digestible. It appears that they picked up a faster pace however, the growling became more like shouting and as inspiration they used Sleep, the sixties and even some shamanistic quirks instead of pain, Eyehategod and the swamp.

Although the riffs remained simple and the rhythm and structure didn’t get more complex, the album’s spirit became more positive and there are more of those little experimenting elements and themes. For instance, at the end of the first song after the intro, titled Spirit molecule; the monotone psychedelic riffing is broken up by piano and acoustic guitar, almost Beatles like, where the piano will be there until the end of the song.

One of my favourite song is the one titled Undying, this is the one that resembles earlier Zoroaster material the most. With almost being 15 minutes in length, paced carefully, including growling and ending with a 5 to 6 minutes of jamming, in which huge Hawkwindesque  delay effects are dominant.

My other favourite is White Dwarf in which the band combined the best moments of the previous two tracks, extremely tense, as if rocky riffs are mixing with Pink Floyd and Hawkwind like trippy effects and guitar flaying. This is what I think is the song that has most feeling to it, dark, occult, dirty and not too long. As for myself, I consider White Dwarf to be the best track on the album.

Then of course we have clusters of ambient effects in the title track, not bad and time stalling at all, it is good to have a break after all those heavy riffs. We also have some classic doom/sludge themes here, with mystic vocals and lastly as a bonus instrumental, percussion based shamanistic dance like track from which a little squealing is all that is missing to be VHK track.

The album is extremely dirty sounding, at the same time being dynamic. Deep, aggressive, even a bit thick at some times. It is the kind of thing that you should not listen to quietly. If I were to compare Zoroaster to other bands I would say Electric Wizard, and mostly their Witchcult album, Sleep from the Jerusalem era and of course the afore mentioned psychedelic grand masters. There aren’t any bad songs on the album and it will most likely be one my favourite of the genre.

Zoroaster @Terminal Doom Recorings, @myspace

(This translation was pried from the cold dead fingers of Thoma.)