Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Vol. 1 album review

Doom metallers’ earliest material rises from the grave

Cover art for Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Vol. 1 album

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Since the success of Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats’ three studio albums – Blood Lust, Mind Control, and The Night Creeper – the band’s first recorded foray, Vol 1, has become something of a Rosetta stone for fans. Originally released as a limited-edition CD-R, with what were essentially demo versions of a nascent form of Uncle Acid, these recordings have come to take on a mythical status.

Rescued from bootleggers and file sharers, Vol. 1 is now widely available. As displayed by Crystal Spiders, Vampire Circus and Wind Up Toys, the elements that made the band so seductive when they broke through – those Sabbath riffs, an innate ear for melody and Beatles-esque harmonies, and horror B-movie obsessions – are already firmly in place.

However, there is a caveat: these are demo recordings that will be more of interest to the completist than to the casual observer.

Julian Marszalek

Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.