BLACK WIDOW IV

After their third album was released in early 1972, Black Widow found themselves dropped by CBS. Undeterred, in August of that year they began an earnest attempt to craft a fourth album, but were disheartened when they could not find a label willing to listen to the material they were cooking up.

Lead singer Kip Trevor eventually became so demoralised by the slump in the band's fortunes that he quit. The rest soldiered on briefly, and in December 1972 recorded a few demos with an American singer with a vocal style remarkably similar to Kip's; however, they soon concluded that Kip was right and in the industry climate at the time they just weren't going to get anywhere, and they all went their separate ways - and that was pretty much the end of the Black Widow story, bar for a brief effort at a revival in the early 2010s.

The tapes from August to December 1972 sat in the vault for a quarter of a century, give or take, when Mystic Records eventually got hold of them, slapped on an album cover, and released it as the long-lost fourth Black Widow album. Technically speaking, that's exactly what it is - though some caveats obviously apply, not least the question of whether you should really count the Rick E.-fronted tracks (making up the final four songs on this release) as properly belonging to the intended album or not. On the one hand, if you cut them out the album ends up perilously short - on the other hand, Black Widow's albums tended to be pretty short anyway, and the two different spans of recording sessions do feel like distinct and separate endeavours.

Mystic Records took the approach of regarding all of them as one album; the most recent rerelease of the album is on the Sabbat Days boxed set by Grapefruit Records, which collects basically everything the band committed to record from 1969 to 1972, and that designates the Rick E. demos as bonus tracks. My inclination is to go with the running order, because there's a very important thing happening in both sets of sessions which does give this album some semblance of thematic unity.

Specifically, what's going on here is that Black Widow are, for the first time in a good while, pursuing their own creative direction without interference from their record company. Sure, controversy creates cash - but the media storm over their Sacrifice album and the Satanically-themed live show associated with it ended up becoming a limiting factor on the band's commercial appeal, and may well have played a role in them being refused a visa to tour America.

Management started to pressure the band to tone things down, creating a rift in the group between those who wanted to stay true to their original vision and those who wanted to reach a wider audience; this led to a pair of albums, the muddled Black Widow and the much-improved (though confusingly titled!) Black Widow III where the band were deliberately trying to tone it down.

Does this mean we get a full-throated return to the dark stylings of Sacrifice here? Well... no. Musically speaking, especially on the Kip-fronted tracks from August 1972, this sounds like a development of the sound of Black Widow III, where the band started to sound a bit like 1971-vintage Yes. Here, though, they drift into a folky, mystical, witchy atmosphere which manages to percolate through into the Rick E. demos, though those songs are briefer and a bit more simple than the wistful psych-prog meditations that make up the first five trcaks here.

The cover illustration of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza here is an apt choice; in these sessions the band really were tilting at windmills, trying to put out progressive music without record company support at a time when the DIY approach that the neo-prog movement would pioneer and later waves of progressive rock would explore further and further just wasn't quite viable in the market as it existed at the time. I don't think Black Widow IV is an excellent album by any means - though it's a bit more original in vision than Black Widow III, it's sufficiently less polished in execution that I think I prefer III a touch more. Nonetheless, it's got the seeds of something good in it, and whilst it's a shame nothing grew from them at the time, it's good that the music here has been preserved for later reappraisal.