“Spell Shock” is a blazing return for Portland Satanic Speed Metal invocators and provocateurs, BEWITCHER. In a decade of manifesting musical darkness and riding roughshod over the groundwork laid by Motörhead and Venom, BEWITCHER has proven itself one of the underground’s most buzzed-about propositions, churning up the pavement with the likes of Cavalera, Municipal Waste and Creeping Death (to name a few). “Spell Shock” is where the threesome not only go back to throttle-down basics on tracks like the bombastic opener, “Starfire Maelstrom” but also revel in the rock with “Out Against the Law” or wax liturgical on the elegiac “We Die In Dust”.

This time, BEWITCHER enlisted none other than legendary guitarist, songwriter and metal-punk fanatic Lars Frederiksen (Rancid, Old Firm Casuals) to help conjure their hell-and-back chaos and the results are nothing short of furiously irrelevant and utterly unholy. Hellfire rarely sounds this good.