Bandcamp Everything about V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is a summoning. The cover, a blank-eyed acolyte offering up a floating black cube against sickly pink, sets the tone, and Rome’s Wizard Master spend the record chasing a fuzzed-out, backmasked, incense-heavy ’70s doom rock that wears its Electric Wizard love openly, right down to a track literally called “The Electric Wizard.” Formed in 2019 and now running their own Füneral Division label, they deal in groove-first occult doom sung in a raw, theatrical clean voice, more ritual than riff-clinic.
The best decision here is a sonic one: they recorded it warm and un-crushed. In a subgenre that too often reaches for modern loudness, most of V.I.T.R.I.O.L. breathes, and it is all the heavier for it. “I Am a Member” has an honest, unpolished live character, robust fuzz and dry organic drums with a wooden snare, and “Path of Disintegration” is the highlight, a genuinely dynamic slab of epic doom with airy headroom, a theatrical clean vocal out front and harsh textures folded in behind. The title-cameo “The Electric Wizard” earns the name, a knurling, dominant bass under thick fuzz and a spacious solo, and even the more classic-metal cuts like “Scorpio Rising” keep that natural, transparent room sound. When the band lock a groove and let the amps sag, they are a properly good time.
What holds it a notch back is the low end. A recurring stack of mud around 200 to 400 Hz, where fuzzed guitars and a fundament-first bass pile up, keeps thinning the note definition in the densest passages, and the closer “Holoprogram” is an odd outlier, lurching into a bricked, triggered blackened-death attack that trades the whole album’s analog warmth for fatiguing loudness. It is the one moment the seance breaks character. A little more low-mid separation, and this would punch well above its weight.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is a warm, groovy, genuinely characterful occult-doom record that values feel and ritual over polish, and its refusal to brickwall puts it ahead of a lot of the fuzz-worship pack. It does not reinvent the Electric Wizard playbook so much as inhabit it with conviction, and for the candles-and-cheap-wine crowd that is exactly the point. Turn the lights down, let it sag, believe.
Fuzzed-out ’70s occult doom rock, groove-first and theatrically clean-sung, and the key strength is that it was recorded warm and un-crushed. “I Am a Member” has an honest unpolished live character with robust fuzz and dry organic wooden-snare drums, and “Path of Disintegration” is the highlight, a dynamic slab of epic doom with airy headroom and a theatrical clean vocal. “The Electric Wizard” earns its name with a knurling dominant bass under thick fuzz and a spacious solo, and even “Scorpio Rising” keeps a natural transparent room sound. The reservations: a recurring low-mid mud stack around 200 to 400 Hz thins note definition in the densest passages, and the closer “Holoprogram” is an outlier that lurches into a bricked, triggered blackened-death attack, trading the album’s analog warmth for fatiguing loudness. Warm, characterful, ahead of the brickwalled fuzz pack.
Standout tracks: Path of Disintegration, The Electric Wizard, I Am a Member
