BLACK WIDOW

After their third album was released in early 1972, Black Widow found themselves dropped by CBS. Undeterred, in August of that year they began an earnest attempt to craft a fourth album, but were disheartened when they could not find a label willing to listen to the material they were cooking up.

Lead singer Kip Trevor eventually became so demoralised by the slump in the band's fortunes that he quit. The rest soldiered on briefly, and in December 1972 recorded a few demos with an American singer with a vocal style remarkably similar to Kip's; however, they soon concluded that Kip was right and in the industry climate at the time they just weren't going to get anywhere, and they all went their separate ways - and that was pretty much the end of the Black Widow story, bar for a brief effort at a revival in the early 2010s.

The tapes from August to December 1972 sat in the vault for a quarter of a century, give or take, when Mystic Records eventually got hold of them, slapped on an album cover, and released it as the long-lost fourth Black Widow album. Technically speaking, that's exactly what it is - though some caveats obviously apply, not least the question of whether you should really count the Rick E.-fronted tracks (making up the final four songs on this release) as properly belonging to the intended album or not. On the one hand, if you cut them out the album ends up perilously short - on the other hand, Black Widow's albums tended to be pretty short anyway, and the two different spans of recording sessions do feel like distinct and separate endeavours.

Mystic Records took the approach of regarding all of them as one album; the most recent rerelease of the album is on the Sabbat Days boxed set by Grapefruit Records, which collects basically everything the band committed to record from 1969 to 1972, and that designates the Rick E. demos as bonus tracks. My inclination is to go with the running order, because there's a very important thing happening in both sets of sessions which does give this album some semblance of thematic unity.

Specifically, what's going on here is that Black Widow are, for the first time in a good while, pursuing their own creative direction without interference from their record company. Sure, controversy creates cash - but the media storm over their Sacrifice album and the Satanically-themed live show associated with it ended up becoming a limiting factor on the band's commercial appeal, and may well have played a role in them being refused a visa to tour America.

Management started to pressure the band to tone things down, creating a rift in the group between those who wanted to stay true to their original vision and those who wanted to reach a wider audience; this led to a pair of albums, the muddled Black Widow and the much-improved (though confusingly titled!) Black Widow III where the band were deliberately trying to tone it down.

Does this mean we get a full-throated return to the dark stylings of Sacrifice here? Well... no. Musically speaking, especially on the Kip-fronted tracks from August 1972, this sounds like a development of the sound of Black Widow III, where the band started to sound a bit like 1971-vintage Yes. Here, though, they drift into a folky, mystical, witchy atmosphere which manages to percolate through into the Rick E. demos, though those songs are briefer and a bit more simple than the wistful psych-prog meditations that make up the first five trcaks here.

The cover illustration of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza here is an apt choice; in these sessions the band really were tilting at windmills, trying to put out progressive music without record company support at a time when the DIY approach that the neo-prog movement would pioneer and later waves of progressive rock would explore further and further just wasn't quite viable in the market as it existed at the time. I don't think Black Widow IV is an excellent album by any means - though it's a bit more original in vision than Black Widow III, it's sufficiently less polished in execution that I think I prefer III a touch more. Nonetheless, it's got the seeds of something good in it, and whilst it's a shame nothing grew from them at the time, it's good that the music here has been preserved for later reappraisal.

Though the choice of title does needlessly muddle the Black Widow discography (there's a self-titled Black Widow album, a Black Widow III, but no Black Widow II!), this third album from the group does at least find them settling on a new musical direction after they more or less entirely abandoned the approach of their breakthrough debut album, Sacrifice, in the wake of massive controversy surrounding its Satanic themes and their ritualistic live show. Their first self-titled album found them casting about a bit in search of a new direction; here, they seem to have found it.

Essentially, whilst their earliest work (under the name of Pesky Gee) saw them taking extensive inspiration from This Was/Stand Up-era Jethro Tull, right about the time when Tull themselves were about to shift away from that approach, this album finds them drawing extensively on the Yes sound circa 1970-1971; sure, their sound is a little rougher, they don't have that distinctive Chris Squire bass sound, and though the contributions of Clive Jones they feature flute and saxophone more extensively. But just listen to the opening of The Battle and tell me with a straight face that doesn't remind you strongly of the opening to Yours Is No Disgrace - you can't do it, can you?

In some respects it's a bit of a shame to hear Black Widow once again jumping on the bandwagon of larger progressive acts in the hopes of snagging a wider audience, especially when their most famous album, Sacrifice, had a much more original approach. On the other hand, this is far from a bland and unimaginative cloning of the Yes sound - it comes across more like they've had The Yes Album on heavy rotation and they've absorbed its musical lessons into their own structure.

If you come to this expecting another Sacrifice, you'll be disappointed, because Black Widow never really went back to that creative well - and that is, I admit, a shame. Nonetheless, if you really enjoy early Yes, and want to hear a folk-psych inflected take on it by musicians who were contemporaries of Yes rather than latter-day retro-prog nostalgia merchants, Black Widow III is pretty good - in retrospect, surprisingly good for a band who were hurtling towards disintegration at the time of its release.

Here's an odd one - a collection of stray tracks from Black Widow, spanning from 1969 to 1971. The collection leads off with the original demos - female vocals intact - for the Sacrifice album, previously released separately as Return To the Sabbat, and this is probably the best part of the package. Then there's a clutch of stray studio tracks which are OK but nothng to write home about, and then a live set from 1971 rounds out the package.

It's the live set which drags the rating down here - because the sound quality is absolutely horrid. It seems very likely it was taken from an audience tape rather than a more official source, and the mix is just terrible; I swear there's points that the vocals are quieter than the chatter from the audience!

I suppose if you really wanted to hear Return To the Sabbat and had no other option, the rest of this collection could be taken as bonus tracks and duly ignored. Otherwise, this compilaton has been rendered redundant by the expansive Sabbat Days boxed set, which includes Return To the Sabbat on its own disk with the cover art restored and delegates the rest of this stuff to bonus tracks here and there.

As is so often the case with bonus tracks, I suspect many listeners will skip over them entirely; they won't be missing a whole lot. Other than the Sacrifice demo, this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. There's some acts I'll go so far as to listen to any cutting room floor leftovers they happen to have lying around, but Black Widow ain't one of them.

Black Widow's second album finds them dialling back the psychedelic and occult influences on their sound, yielding a sort of bluesy proto-prog approach. Opening number Tears and Wine, for instance, lands particularly close to the sound Audience had circa House On the Hill when it comes to finding comparisons on the wider scene, particularly on the opening Tears and Wine; other moments, like The Journey or Poser, suggest the influence of early Deep Purple. Zoot Taylor's organ and piano contributions and Clive Jones' interjections on flute and sax make sure that there's a touch of psych-prog still in play, but it's certainly less original and distinctive than their debut album, Sacrifice.

This may have boded ill for Black Widow going forwards, lending credence to the perception that once they moved away from their eye-catching early concept there wasn't that much to them, and certainly there's a touch of the "transitional album" here. On the plus side, this does mean that the sound is fairly varied; on the downside, it'll be a rare listener that loves all of these tunes equally. The Gypsy, for instance is a mostly-acoustic number save for a volcanic electric guitar solo, which isn't quite a novelty song but feels like it's at risk of going in that direction at any moment.

There's flashes of a potentially new vision here and there; Mary Clark, in particular, comes across especially well, though there's a caveat here - it's actually a left-over song from the Sacrifice sessions, the earlier version of which was left off the album because it didn't fit the concept, and so the update here is more of a flash of the genius which once animated the band rather than the light at the end of the tunnel for their creative crisis.

Had Black Widow swiftly found a strong new creative vision to pursue after moving on from the style of Sacrifice, perhaps their history would have been different. As it stands, it's easy to see how at the time the album didn't quite hit the mark - anyone keen for the Sacrifice approach would have felt disappointed, anyone open to a new direction might regard what they're playing here as rather similar to what a lot of progressive groups were doing at the time. In retrospect, it's not half bad, with The Journey and Mark Clark being particular highlights, but it's unsurprising it got lost in the shuffle. One for those who particularly like the sound of the more Deep Purple-ish end of proto-prog.

This is the third of the three distinct ways you can take in Black Widow's debut concept album, Sacrifice. The first-released, second-recorded one is, of course, the Sacrifice album itself; second-released but earlier-recorded was Return To the Sabbat, the demo version of the album which included Kay Garret on vocals before she left the band which was finally saw an official release in 1997.

This was recorded the last of all the three, and released the last - being a live show from the Sacrifice tour. It seems like Black Widow's live show at this time basically consisted of playing the entire Sacrifice album, which nmakes sense because even though they had a previous existence as Pesky Gee, the Exclamation Mark album didn't exactly have many classic tracks on it aside from the cover versions of work by much bigger acts.

However, the live show expanded on the Sacrifice concept, working in masses of theatrical flair and, in particular, focusing on adding in more ritualistic elements that give the performance the air of an actual occult gathering, and pehraps qualifies this as the best version of the complete narrative.

BLACK WIDOW were a British Jazz-Rock band formed in Leicester in 1969. They released their first album under the name Pesky Gee! in 1969, before wisely deciding to change the name of the band to Black Widow. Their first album as Black Widow, titled "Sacrifice" (1970) caused some controversy at the time because of the dark satanic occult imagery in the lyrics and accompanying mock sacrifice video for the title song. It was all part of an elaborate stage act though and they were no more satanic than Black Sabbath and nowhere near as outrageous as the Shock Rock stage act of Alice Cooper. The band dropped the dark satanic imagery for their next two albums, the imaginatively-titled "Black Widow" (1971) and "Black Widow III" (1972), although those two albums failed to achieve the success of the first album. They recorded another album in 1972, predictably titled "Black Widow IV", although that album wouldn't see the light of day for another 25 years until 1997. Another album titled "Return to the Sabbat" was released in 1998, although it contained no original material as the album consisted entirely of an earlier recording of their 1970 "Sacrifice" album. Black Widow weren't quite dead and buried yet though because they rose from the grave with their long-awaited comeback album "Sleeping with Demons" in 2011.

The opening song "In Ancient Days" conjures up a spooky Hammer horror movie image of a graveyard at night, where the haunting sound of the solo organ gives the impression that some ghostly apparition is about to suddenly leap out of the shadows. Don't have nightmares though, because this is just a prelude to some uplifting funky Jazz-Rock. It's easy to see why some religious conservatives might have been spooked by these sinister demonic lyrics though:- "Here in my thirteenth life the mystic power of old returns, and as I say these words, my soul again in Hell, I conjure thee, I conjure thee, I conjure thee, I conjure thee appear, I raise you mighty demon, come before me, join me here." ..... The lyrics might be dark and occult, but the music is really jaunty and Jazzy and proggy and the satanic sacrificial imagery in the lyrics and video never did their album sales any harm. The lively and invigorating Jazz-Rock of Black Widow bears no relation to the dark Heavy Metal of Black Sabbath, who the band have sometimes been compared to. There's more doom and dark satanic gloom on the way with "Way to Power", where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are mentioned in the sinister lyrics, although the rollicking music is another solid slice of foot-stomping British Jazz-Rock. This lively feel-good music is more likely to inspire jumping and jiving on the dance floor, rather than giving the listener a scary touch of the heebie-geebies. The next song "Come to the Sabbat" DOES sound very sinister though, so it might be time to hide beneath the bedcovers, especially when you hear the repeated sinister refrain of "Come to the Sabbat, Satan's There". There's really nothing to worry about though, as we live in far more enlightened times these days, and this stirring harum scarum Jazz-Rock hokum is no more scary than a candlelit pumpkin at Halloween. Side One closes with "Conjuration", which rumbles along nicely to a slow marching rhythm with the rousing horn section weaving their magical spell.

Black Widow have conjured up a big romantic power ballad for the Side Two opener: "Seduction". You're sure to be seduced by the lush string arrangements and the playful and pleasurable Jazz organ solo. This song is like a bright ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds compared to the dark satanic imagery conjured up in Side One. The singer sounds like he's head over heels in love with these warm and tender lyrics:- "Would you have me stay with you, Squeeze and hold you tight, Smooth you with my tender touch, Share your bed at nights." ..... From the sound of things, it could be his lucky night. Next up is "Attack of the Demon", a rompin' stompin' barnstorming display of Jazzy prog to stimulate and invigorate the senses. We end the album with the powerful 11-minute-long title track "Sacrifice". It's an all-out sonic assault of thunder and lightning for the final song. The music barrels along at a relentless pace with the manic drummer and frantic Hammond organist hammering away in a non-stop cacophonous frenzy of high-decibel sound and energy. This is music designed to hit you straight between the eyes with the awesome power of a thunderbolt.

Black Widow represents British Jazz-Rock at its brilliant best. The band weave a wonderful web of timeless timbral tunes, ranging from raucous rockers to romantic refrains. It's no "Sacrifice" to say this stunning album deserves to be in any discerning Jazz-Rock connoisseur's collection.

Black Widow ' Sacrifice (1970)

Don't expact anything heavier then Manfred Mann's Earthband on this record. Solid art rock with some minor progressive rock linings. A warm 1970 sound with organs, pumping bass, some nice guitars and reasonably good vocals ' characteristic if nothing too special. Every song has some great catchy ideas and a twist sound wise ' take for example the pumping string section on 'Come to the Sabbat'. None of the songs sound like they were developed fully as compositions. Black Widow often just repeats verses & refrains and then runs out of ideas. Moreover, the playful satanic lyrics fail to work as memorable lyrics of catchy songs. These shortcomings disqualify 'Sacrifice' as an album to listen to with full attention, yet I can't help liking it a lot on the background. Every songs has some great moment and the energy of the record is great, very sympathetic and executed with proper energy. The artwork on my Akarma gate-fold reprint is glorious and adds to the enjoyment. Yes, I will recommend this a great little forgotten gem of the heavy psych era, just don't expect too much. More like a three-and-a-halve stars for this one.

Evolving from the light-hearted, jazzy band Pesky Gee!, Black Widow did a rebranding on par with Adidas journey into sustainable practices on this album. In a vein similar to Black Sabbath, "Sacrifice" explores occult themes and satanic rituals through its twisted lyrics.

As early as in the opener "In ancient days", it is however obvious that the thematic tangency with the gods of metal is not applicable on the band's sound. Starting of with a spooky organ, the song evolves into a jazzy powerhouse accompanied by detonating hammond chords, smooth saxophone passages and lyrics concerning the awakening of a demon (a recurring theme). Continuing the mellow atmosphere, "Way to power" has a heavy, sax-driven verse, and the whole composition feels like a companion piece to the earlier song. An amazing start of the album.

"Come to the sabbath" is - not too surprising - the single of the LP. With it's diabolic chorus and creepy humming, the piece brilliantly showcases why Black Widows had an influence on black metal bands of the 80's. An instant classic, it grew on me as a listener, and even my girlfriend has remembered the tribal rhyme "Come, come, come to the sabbath, come to the sabbath, Satan's there".

The following two tracks, "Conjuration" and "Seduction" cool things down a bit before the climatic ending pieces of the B-side, with the jazz origins of Pesky Gee! becoming palpable. Being at the top of capacity, "Attack of the demon" has a boogie-vibe to it, with chilling lyrics ("All of my sins has left me in hell!"). Being the proggiest song on the album, the 11-minute long title track is an exquisite piece, containing a ravishing middle section of flute and organ solos.

Black Widow may not succeed at exploring the dark harmony the way Black Sabbath did with their revolutionary debut album, but it is nevertheless a potent work in its own right, rather sharing musical characteristics with Jethro Tull and Atomic Rooster. Being released in 1970, the album is a wonder of early prog rock, and is actually really consistent the whole journey through. Sadly enough, their following releases would neither have the strong musical identity nor as dark lyrical themes as this offering, making Black Widow somewhat of a one-hit-wonder. Bold, controversial and surprisingly catchy, "Sacrifice" is a hidden gem of prog rock.

Black Widow's Sacrifice offers a potent and sinister concept, but it took a while for it to grow on me. If you're going for an unambiguously horror-oriented story with lots and lots of spooky atmosphere, it's not going to quite work for you - there's this sort of air of witchy sensuality and magical romance running through it which leads to a more complex and nuanced emotional palette than you might expect from the concept, though admittedly the material doesn't always get this across very effectively. Return to the Sabbat, which collects the demo version of the album, manages to deliver a spookier experience simply by keeping it sinister and lo-fi; the live rendition of the album offered on Demons of the Night Gather To See Black Widow Live expands on the concept by capturing some of the ritualistic aspects of the band's presentation of the concept. Still, I quite appreciate their commitment to the bit here, even if the vision presented here is more bluesy and soulful than their hardcore Hammer Horror concept may lead you to expect.

I've always previously found Black Widow to be an album I just didn't "get", but these original demo tapes for Black Widow's debut album have won me over. With Kay Garret - lead vocalist from the band's previous incarnation as Pesky Gee - still around to provide female vocals, the theatrical intention of the conceptual song sequence is teased out more effectively (it really does help to have different people singing the different parts in this case), and whilst the sound quality isn't pristine, it's actually pretty solid for 1960s demo material. If nothing else, I can see why the likes of Blood Ceremony look to Black Widow for inspiration, and it's inspired me to take another look at their discography.