#warfaring strangers

[falsestuff]

Air -  Twelve O’Clock Satanial (1972)

[modernelectricvinyl]

Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles

2014 U.S. compilation on Numero Group

File Under: Tolkien Rock!

I bought this compilation for a few reasons. The first being that, in my mind, Numero can do no wrong. They are a label that have always put out very interesting specialty music. Secondly, I’m a big fan of this Warfaring Strangers series, already having owned the Acid Nightmares installment from 2017.

This installment comes from three years previous to that one, and features some great mid-70′s metal bands who’s influences are very obvious. You can tell these bands listened to Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, and there’s more than enough dragons, wizards and sorcery here to keep any fan of J.R.R. Tolkien happy. Great, fun songs by the likes of Stone Axe, Medusa, Wizard, and Hellstorm.   

The release also has a nice 14-page booklet that nicely illustrates the history of each track.

I highly recommend this, but then again, I highly recommend everything that Numero puts out.

[robotdanceparty]

Warfaring Strangers - Acid Nightmare. Another collection from Numero Group, my current favorite digging spot for unknown treasures lost to time. A collection of late 60's / early 70's psychedelic acid rock. With flocked black light poster gatefold jacket, a booklet detailing the 45rpm singles used to compile the collection. And dual jet black vinyl records.

[vintagerpg]

Going out into left field again with a double LP, Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles, from Numero Group. It is a 16-song collection of obscure 1970s bands with names like Stone Axe, Wizard, Medusa and Hellstorm. The D&D connection should be self-evident.

Heavy metal is, in a lot of ways, Dungeons & Dragons’ older brother. Born out of Led Zeppelin’s obsession with Lord of the Rings and Black Sabbath’s thunderous occult riffs, metal is a natural soundtrack for roleplaying games (seriously, listen to the first Bolt Thrower album and try to not think of Warhammer). Metal and RPGs attracted outsiders of similar stripes. They also courted controversy by embracing a certain amount of sinister imagery. Both got burned, yet both went on to become mainstays of the cultural landscape.

You’d probably be hard pressed to describe the tracks on Warfaring Strangers as heavy metal. This is early stuff, made by kids who never went anywhere, who were imitating their musical heroes and acting out sword and sorcery fantasies through music. It is about as removed from modern metal as the modern gaming industry is from the wargaming scene of the early 70s. Check it out on Spotify, though, you might find a solid groove or two (my favorite is probably “Sorcerer,” by Junction or “Slave of Fear,” by Stone Axe).

The art direction is kind of worth the price of admission on its own. The cover looks like the back of a million school notebooks from the 70s and 80s. The interior art is drawn on blue lined graph paper. It is glorious.

[sonofshermy]

Benjamin Marra

[stenka-razin]

Stonehenge - King of the Golden Hall

[allmyalbums]

Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles  (2014)

Aaa this is so good. The Numero Group collects old rare recordings and remasters them, and they amassed enough 70s Tolkein/D&D inspired rock songs to do a whole compilation. There is an associated board game where you play one of the bands and try to defeat other nerd-metal bands and OF COURSE I should have thought about that before I bought a second copy of the album for my DM, who had of course already bought the game itself.

http://www.allmusic.com/album/warfaring-strangers-darkscorch-canticles-mw0002593744

[junerecords]

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Various Artists: Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles (Numero) With Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles, the impacts of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath on US shores and heartlands is revealed as a bludgeoning previously undescribed. In this collection, medieval Bonham thunk and febrile Iommi guitar leads crowd out the bluesy Americana that foregrounded those bands, replacing hippie pastoralism with mythology, armored conflict, sorcery, and doom. From legions of occult-obsessive 1970s bonehead teens, we summoned a horde of 16 bands, cloaked in eons of tortured obscurity, whose sole release amounts to a blistering chapter ripped free of rock’s lumbering mythos. This music hails from an occluded realm, somewhere just beyond the pot-addled minds of its creators. Lyrically, the Darkscorch Canticles trifle with themes most grave: crippling fear, pagan hostility, paranoia, power addiction - even necromancy. Satan’s name is openly invoked, alongside Sauron’s. These worried, warlike Canticles occupy a miniscule niche in the American underground of self-released rock, but their appeal is more broad today than in any previous era. One year ago, Medusa’s mysterious First Step Beyond LP emerged from its Chicago forge, numbered in gold, sheathed in the black faux-velvet of a centaur’s nutsack, heralding The Numero Group’s first dive into the Stygian caverns of the American hard rock underground. But Darkscorch Canticles hail from no simple aural landscape: Numero 048 melds amateur D&D artwork with stout chunks of stoner basement rock, grafting physical music artifacts into an imagined world.