Look. We admit it. We have a soft spot for people who love music the way we do and so we do love Numero. Why? Because of the awesome Prince related compilation of early Minneapolis jams “Purple Rain” full of unheard mystery. And for the funky Good God gospel compilations. And for rediscovering the black rock soul psych of fathers Children. And for the utterly brilliant Nicaraguan political salsa of Alfonso Lovo. And for understanding that its about finding the music and making the packaging and getting it right.

Done right all types of music can be intriguing and worth a revisit.

So we are particularly in love with “Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles”  - a compilation which promises to take us back to the wave of kids who were influenced to heaviness by Purple, Zeppelin and Sabbath and which Numero bills as “music that hails from an occluded realm, somewhere just beyond the pot-addled minds of its creators …(and)… replacing hippie pastoralism with mythology, armored conflict, sorcery, and doom”. How could that fail.

 

But frankly do we love it because it’s going to be cool? or because we read a review on Noisey by J.Bennett? Whose band Ides of Gemini we are sadly ill informed about but based on the below are clearly awe inspiringly doomy -

 

We have edited Bennett’s wisdom below but you can read it all here and stream some songs but you get the gist

“it was sort of a given that everyone in the ‘70s with a guitar and/or a moustache was getting high. If your body managed to escape the draft, your mind required its own way out, and a veritable legion of pasty North American teenagers found one in the holy trinity of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and local dirt-weed….. Toss in a mom’s-basement-dwelling escapist undercurrent of Tolkein novels and pre-Dungeon & Dragons role-playing games, and you’ve got the basis for Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles,  Darkscorch is a different beast, featuring 16 dope-huffing, Hobbit-humping, one-off rock bands from the late, great 1970s. Which means lots of band names that act as double-entendres for getting high as hell: Stonehenge. Stone Axe. Stoned Mace.

 

A band called Medusa, not be outdone—or only to be outdone, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing—by a band called Gorgon Medusa. Songs entitled “Sorcerer,” “Wizzard King,” “King Of The Golden Hall” and “Song Of Sauron.” A band called Air that isn’t two French guys with a keyboard and a drum machine. You get the drift.  Bands that played mostly keggers, strip clubs, and high-school dances but managed to score the occasional dream gig supporting the Stooges, MC5 or Bob Seger System (like Saginaw, Michigan’s faded sons Sonaura, who opened for all three). Sometimes they’d break up during a smoke machine debacle while opening for Frijid Pink (that’d be the aforementioned Gorgon Medusa, who hailed from Chicago). If they managed to get out of town, they slogged across touring circuits that consisted of the shittiest third of the Rust Belt—or, like, Greater Ontario. There were bands that practiced in farmhouse coal chutes (like Indiana’s Stoned Mace). Bands that flirted with majors, released one LP, and then quit to become lawyers and produce Buddy Miles records (like Tampa’s Wizard). Bands led by guys who, today, can’t even remember the last names of the other dudes in their own band—like George Bisinov, vocalist/guitarist for Houston’s Space Rock, a band that recorded their lone single in a studio located under a bowling alley. Think about that for a second.

 

They did all this, of course, while baked out of their tits.  

It doesn’t even matter if the stories in the liner notes are true. All the best legends are based on a solid foundation of oft-repeated rumours or outright lies.

The songs on Darkscorch Canticles are largely hit or miss. But the hits are so worth inhaling.”

 

Doesn’t that sort of sound too good to miss? And (naturally) it comes on GATEFOLD double vinyl.

We told you they do this shit right.

 

-TH

Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles is available now online (don’t f**k around and buy the digital though, cop the gatefold vinyl with all the extra bits) and at all record stores that know what’s up.