Album review: Lucifer “Lucifer IV”
Lucifer drags us back to the graveyard for another sinister night of 70s hard rock dancing.
Lucifer’s music is doomy, often dreamy and always very good 1970s-style hard rock. “Black Sabbath meets Fleetwood Mac” is how drummer and songwriter Nicke Andersson described Lucifer’s music to me backstage at Club Quattro in Shibuya, Tokyo after a sweaty Lucifer gig in 2019. (Side note for readers that question the Fleetwood-Sabbath link: Former Fleetwood Mac vocalist Dave Walker briefly replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath in 1977-78.) That description still fits the band, founded by the German vocalist Johanna Platow Andersson in Berlin in 2014, as it is about to unleash its fourth studio album. They have now truly established themselves as the talented bastard child of a drunken encounter between Motörhead and Blue Öyster Cult in a Soho back alley. Lucifer got Motörhead’s attitude and Öyster’s musicality and turned it into terrific hazy doom rock. Song titles such as “Archangel of Death”, “Wild Hearses”, “Bring Me His Head”, “Mausoleum”, “The Funeral Pyre” and “Cold as a Tombstone” point to a morbid fascination with death and graveyards. I love this band. They’re cool as fuck without even trying. While the Johanna-Nicke relationship, both privately and professionally, wasn’t there at the start, it is now the central pillar of the band Lucifer. Nicke (also known for bands such as Entombed, The Hellacopters and Imperial State Electric) and the rest of the band (Linus Björklund and Martin Nordin on guitars and Harald Göthblad on bass) are Swedish and the band is nowadays based in Stockholm. The track “Crucifix (I Burn for You)” is an obvious highlight with its sinister catchiness, but my favourite track might be “Mausoleum” with its church organ-like intro. The bluesy “Louise” is another fabulously gorgeous song on a killer album. Find your dance shoes, because this evening we’re doing some graveyard dancing with Lucifer.
Lucifer’s album “Lucifer IV” will be released on 29th October via Century Media Records.
