The Osiris Club - The Wine-Dark Sea album review

Dark psycho-delia from behind the velvet curtain

Cover art for The Osiris Club - The Wine-Dark Sea album

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Still firmly in the elusive nutjobs’ miasmic, fever-dream world of cobwebbed velvet, cigars stubbed out on bloody carpets and the faint but persistent stench of laudanum punch, The Wine-Dark Sea feels like an exercise in subtle expansion. With several new shades of intoxicating yet more incisive songwriting, this is the most Osiris Club-sounding Osiris Club record yet – an effervescent blend of psychedelic rock, glowering post-punk and mischievous, scattershot prog. The likes of eerie opener Wormwood Grange and angular melodrama With The Giants share a little DNA with Ghost’s wilder moments, but here the madness is real. In spirit and sound, this belongs to the hazy limbo between ’shroom-addled space rock, wonky psych-pop and all-out prog rock abandon. Closing epic A Winters Night On Sentinal Hill cranks up all three simultaneously, resulting in one of the most irresistible bad trips you’ll ever hear.

Dom Lawson
Writer

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s.