voila_la_scorie I grew up with a view from my living room window overlooking the Fraser River and the City of New Westminster on the other side. It sure was a surprise years later to learn that Devin Townsend, who is a year younger than me, was born in and grew up in New West. I looked out at his home town nearly every morning for many years. New Westminster was where I did a year of collage (the collage appeared in an episode of 21 Jump Street with Johnny Depp running down the concourse steps), where I sometimes went to buy old magazines or snoop for photography books in the library, and where John Ritter went coasting down 6th Avenue on a bicycle at the end of the TV movie version of Stephen King's "It".

Now the name New Westminster crops up again as it is where Black Wizard are from. Yay, New West! I remember when they installed speakers to play classical music outside the train station in an effort to keep the skids and rockers from hanging out below the Sky Train where they allegedly traded drugs. New West became a bit of a tough town in the 80's, and if I recall correctly, the Hell's Angels rented a house there after the police chased them out of my home town in the 70's.

But on to Black Wizard! The band is a bit tough to pigeonhole. Basically, they are of the stoner metal variety, perhaps more from selected tracks of the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage era of Black Sabbath. The vocals sound a bit like Ozzy in Symptom of the Universe only increased in power by 5 and bolstered with a volatile concoction of toxic gases that, when released, sound like that grumpy dude at the end of the street flipping his lid over having to tell the neighbourhood kids one too many times to stay the fuck out of his fruit trees!

The band does a pretty good job of playing somewhere along the lines of stoner metal with doom riffs on a track or two and a couple of songs charging along not quite like thrash metal but good and derailingly fast like some Anvil songs.

The album shows an appreciable diversity in the tracks, enough so that it's possible to recognize most of them after a few listens, but still keep to the main theme of the music. It's all pummel and thump throughout most of the album.

Listening to it tonight with my reviewer's cap on, there were certain tracks to stand out like the title track, "Portraits" for it's less-than-super-fast thrash feel, "Heavy Love" and the closer "Eternal Illusion" which has a great Sabbath-esque riff to it.

I like this album enough that I am interested in checking out their previous release, "New Waste" (a play on New West, I wonder?). Pretty darn good, solid hitting, heavy album.