Rhode Island is not a place you normally think of when the subject of strong metal scenes arise. Vital Remains and The Body spring to mind, but little else, and there's not a lot of musical epoxy to bridge the two together into a coherent representation of Providence metal. So where do Pilgrim – a trio of defiantly regressive doom revivalists – fit into the picture?
The answer is they really don't. Much like the way Slipknot innovated their way to the top of the heap specifically because of not having many local Des Moines bands to feed off of, Pilgrim are mostly left to the whims of their own vinyl collections… crates which no doubt contain loads of St. Vitus, Sabbath and Candlemass, with maybe the occasional Yob thrown in.
In my 2012 top 10 list, I lamented that Metal Blade had seemingly dropped the ball on promoting a band that I felt should have been one of the most storied of the year. There may have been more to it than that. I ran into Jon Rossi a.k.a. "The Wizard" at a recent SXSW gig, where he informed me that he wasn't too fond of Misery Wizard himself. I was floored, but the conversation was kind of in passing so I didn't get to ask him why.
One factor in his displeasure might have been the recording quality, which sounds much brighter and expansive on this year's Void Worship. Rossi's vocals are cleaner and more discernible, the guitars and rhythm section both much more monumental – imposing, even – than on the debut. This turns out to be an indispensable upgrade, though, because the slower, more lumbering pace on Void Worship would have suffered fatally under the kind of closeted mix that befell Misery Wizard.
Not sure if it was intentional, but "Intro" actually proves exactly that: the compressed quality of the guitars relegate the brief track to demo status. It may have been a flippant gesture at whatever circumstances dictated the recording of the previous album, or it may have been a completely unintentional result of separate recording sessions, but either way, "Master's Chamber" follows in stark contrast, crashing ride cymbals and Rossi's high pitched singing acting like a beacon against the intro's foggy muck.
Another thing setting this album apart from its predecessor is a greater variation in shifting tempos, the Yob-like dirge of "Master's Chamber" easing effortlessly into the uptempo Candlesmass worship of "The Paladin". Whereas Misery Wizard admittedly felt at times as if song length was being justified by cramming several tracks worth of riffs into one tune just to simulate an "epic" feel, the eight tracks here feel much more self-contained, with only three of them exceeding the five-minute mark.
Much more so than the first record, Void Worship is more of a modern doom album; Rossi's strident vocals are still redolent of the 80's, but his guitar riffs as well as Krolg's fractured, heavy handed drumming bear far more of a sludge influence than Misery Wizard. This is a record that seems to straddle two worlds, but in reality is just using the fruits of sludge to fuel the band's fundamentalist doom obsessions.
It's a gamble that will gain some new fans and lose some others, but when a band this good goes relatively unnoticed after their first album is released on a premier metal label, you can't blame them for wanting to mix it up a little.
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