The young Rhode Island doom revivalists Pilgrim spent the first four minutes of their 2012 debut building a sort of altar for the voice of the Wizard, their vibrato-emboldened frontman. With clattering drums and crackling amplifiers, the trio wound again and again through one sticky riff, alternately stretching and strengthening it; at one point, a ghoulish choir even harmonized with it. When the band paused briefly, their dramatic stop marked their lord’s grand entrance. “All those who hail to my crown,” the Wizard sang, his theatrical tone arching above the volume to play his required role and address his suppliants. “I know your name.” The six songs on Misery Wizard hinged on that voice, registering Pilgrim as heirs apparent to a lineage that included Black Sabbath and Candlemass. They weren’t looking to break boundaries, integrate extreme technicality, or even be very grandiloquent, like their peers of the moment, Pallbearer. They seemed content to follow big riffs for long trips around fables concerning crystals and elders, wizards and pariahs, all delivered by a voice that seemed like a relic faithfully restored from a bygone era.
At least initially, their follow-up, the new II: Void Worship: seems to follow that same basic setup. A rather playful, guitar-only intro sets up a sudden full-band bash, the rhythm section hammering out a doleful beat beneath an ascendant electric theme. When it all quiets down, the Wizard steps in again, his voice deeper now but his authority intact: “In the master’s chamber/ I was turned to stone,” he sings in lockstep with his guitar. The Wizard sings two verses, cresting in the second as he relays the peril of a spell (or fever dream?) that’s left his head spinning. And on the short, stomping successor “The Paladin”, the Wizard sounds again like a vintage frontman, his story of vigilante justice cast in reverb and delivered like a battle cry. Between its build-up and payoff, its terse verses and dense solo, “The Paladin” is the automatic single of the first two Pilgrim albums, an efficient encapsulation of all this band’s assets.
But then the Wizard, or at least his voice, disappears for 10 minutes. Pilgrim lurks through the instrumental dirge “Arcane Sanctum” and then rips through its inverse, an aggressive wordless lunge called “In the Process of Evil”. These brief, complementary pieces offer a mid-album revelation for Void Worship, because it’s here that Pilgrim’s biggest change between albums becomes clear: They don’t depend upon the Wizard’s retrofitted voice like they once did. Aside from the exasperated chant he leads at the end of “Master’s Chamber”, he actually sings on only about a quarter of the album’s opening epic. Though his tale of demonic seduction serves as the centerpiece of closer “Away from Here”, with his voice dipping into a bellow and peaking into a thespian’s falsetto, the story only consumes a small sliver of the song. The rest goes to the riff and the rhythm, advancing in perfectly deliberate unison and pushing into a void of variation. Last year, Pilgrim’s bassist, Count Elric the Soothsayer, took his leave, forcing the band to reconsider their approach and adjust to life as a duo. They seem to have taken this is an invitation not to thin their sound but rather to reinforce it; on drums, the wonderfully named Krolg Splinterfist, Slayer of Men moves with the Wizard’s guitar with a twin sense of economy and power. The Wizard also adds bass, and his approach is more oriented to fortifying his own guitar melodies and tying them to the drums than necessarily developing a distinct voice. Void Worship sounds more relentless and loaded than its predecessor, even though Pilgrim often forgoes the additional layer of vocals. Coupled with proper production in New Jersey’s Moonlight Mile studio, Pilgrim sounds appropriately massive for its proper Metal Blade entrance.
The Wizard’s relative restraint will no doubt disappoint some of Pilgrim’s early adopters, as it was a calling card for the band’s 21st century anachronism. But the move also helps to fade Pilgrim’s timestamp, or the sense that they champion an era so much that they could be a vestige of it. Their abiding sense of doom remains intact, and Pilgrim now seem one step ahead of their heritage, capable of writing around the records from which they learned. Perhaps if Pilgrim add a permanent new bassist, they’ll resort to their earlier approach, and the Wizard’s classic air will push back toward. But for now, Void Worship takes what was essential about Misery Wizard and compacts it while expanding Pilgrim’s overall scope—a fitting progression for a pair of genre loyalists.
