ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 27 JULY 2022
There’s been a prevailing popularity of hardcore-inflected sludge bands over recent years and one of the rising lights (or maybe darkness) over the local landscape is western Sydney’s Mountain Wizard Death Cult. Since 2018, they have been spreading their gloomy atmospheric doom across venues and with a series of harrowing digital releases.
The band’s most recent track Initiation is the precursor to an album coming late this year, and follows last year’s Wretch that came as a split release with Astrodeath. This week they will line up as part of the world’s remotest music festival, Blacken Open Air, a show guitarist Chris Chaplin nominates as a goal they set almost as soon as they formed as a band.
“I think [drummer] Lochie [Livingston Wilk] even said in an interview once when we first started as band that it was a massive goal to play Blacken,” he says. “Middle of the desert… that would be one of the funnest shows you’d ever do in Australia for sure.”
Barely able to wipe the smile from his face, it’s obvious he’s eager about the show, which they were originally booked to play last year.
“To get on the first time, and be like, ‘Yes it’s actually going to happen!’, then to have it rescheduled at the last minute and now… to be just about to trek off again – oh dude, so keen!”
His obvious excitement belies the cautious attitude he feels that we all need to take in an era of public health crises and (now) airline uncertainty.
MWDC has already had touring forestalled by border closures.
“It’s hard to get properly excited about it,” Chaplin says. “It took us three to four attempts at trying to leave NSW before we finally got to do it. We did that tour at the beginning of the year. So now when we have big plans coming up, I probably don’t get that excitement that I used to get. But at the moment it looks like, for the foreseeable future, it’s all good. Make hay while the sun shines!”
Chaplin’s music is less evocative of sunshine than it is of uncomfortable bleakness and cold dark, and given that his band’s name literally contains the phrase “death cult”, some would hardly expect the cheery and good-natured bloke he clearly is. But he’s keen to point out that the band and its music are separate entities from the individual characters of its members. The name isn’t an extension of some weird desire to create a metal murder cult or indulge in arcane occult practices.
“For us, the name of the band represented the way it sounded and the lyrical content”
Chris Chaplin
“We have people who come up to us who are like, ‘Are people going to join your cult, man?’” he says, putting on a goofy voice and gesturing like a stoned hippie. “We’re not trying to portray that type of image. There’s some bands where everybody’s personality sort of comes across and they’re all in character. For us, the name of the band represented the way it sounded and the lyrical content – and then that influences the way it looks, obviously, and the way it’s expressed, but it’s not really our personalities.”
Mountain Wizard Death Cult are part of a growing movement of more extreme musical acts that are becoming increasingly difficult to classify, a group that almost subverts the idea of genrefication in a creative universe that has almost as many sub-genres as artists. Even Chaplin finds it difficult to pin down a good description of their style.
“When we started off, with our first gig, we thought, ‘What are we gonna call it?’, and I think I said, ‘Let’s call it psychedelic doom’, and then as we were coming to the show we thought, ‘What the fuck?’” He laughs. “This is not Electric Wizard, or something! Over the years I think I would say we’re closer to a post-metal band. I think we’re closer to bands like Cult of Luna, and Isis, but we’ve always loved our doomy stuff. We’ve always liked Sleep and Electric Wizard and YOB – not a lot of modern doom, but there’s all these elements in there. Our vocalist [JJ Brady] had more of a hardcore background, and he brings his thing into it, and so people latch onto that and are like, ‘Oh, you’re a ‘core band’.”
One band that Chaplin gravitates to when it comes to comparisons from a creative standpoint is British riffmeisters Conjurer, another band who is difficult to pigeonhole.
“I had a bit of a break recently and I didn’t listen to too much stuff, but one of the things that I didn listen to was the new Conjurer album,” Chaplin says. “What I heard was what I think about our own band. It’s not intentional, but there’s so many different things in that, but it still has this undercurrent of… it’s still bleak, it’s still dark. It will bring you into the atmosphere. That’s one of my favourite things. It doesn’t really matter what the genre is, but am I in that world? Does it feel real to me, that sense of urgency in that atmosphere? Is it genuine? And that record was right on.”
For his part, he believes that MWDC is another band that isn’t about trying to be any particular style.
“I think we try to create a similar thing. I don’t think we need to pay attention, too much, to, ‘Oh do we need to be a doom band?’ We try not to pay too much attention to that, but there’s a core thing about it that makes it work. I think at the opposite end of that, say a band that does lots of different styles but are really obvious about it, is a band like Twelve Foot Ninja. That’s more prog, more Mr Bungle-esque: this section is this style, the next section is this style – and that’s their style. Locally,” he says, giving props to a fellow western Sydney act, “a band like Foothills is in that death/doom/hardcore sort of vein, but in that it’s also not easy to say exactly what kind of band they are. I hope we see more of it! I find it interesting.”
The diversity of bands like Mountain Wizard Death Cult seems to be creating a solid audience not only locally but throughout the world as more extreme acts continue to experiment, and currently much of it seems to revolve around various forms of doom and sludge.
“Every genre has its peaks and troughs as far as popularity, and different bands, but I do think that the audiences are a little more open minded,” Chaplin says. “I think that’s a metalhead thing in general too, that people appreciate originality, maybe more so than in other styles of music. I think there’s a really healthy community of bands in Sydney that’s been happening for a few years and it only seems to be growing at the moment, which is killer.”
Mountain Wizard Death Cult will be part of the Sydney contingent laying waste at Blacken Open Air. Having achieved their goal of being included on the bill the very first time they put their name forward is special enough, but Chaplin is looking forward to the festival experience as much as he is to performing there.
“I’ve always just wanted to go out to that part of the country. I love the bush, I love hiking and camping in my normal life, so getting to go out there and play is just perfect. It couldn’t get any better. There’s a lot of mates going out there too in other bands, so it’s going to be great just being at a festival with everyone after so long. And I feel that it’s just going to feel surreal. All of my friends that have been there and all of the bands that have played there, everyone has said it’s like no other event they’ve ever been to. That’s in comparison to, like, European festivals and whatever. It’s incredibly unique, and the line-up’s killer this year, as well. I love Revocation. It’s crazy that Revocation is coming all this way to play for it, and even having Amyl & the Sniffers on, it’s going to be fun.”
He’s also hoping to discover some killer bands he has never even heard of before.
“That’s the festival experience. It’s like you go along and see a band and you’ve never thought of these guys, and then you see them and they blow you away! I’m sure I’ll have the same thing happen at, like, one in the morning! I’m hoping for that.”