IN CAUDA SEMPER STAT VENENUM

One of the recurring controversies surrounding this release was whether it genuinely came out in 1969 or not. Having given the subject some thought, I think I have to side with the sceptics on this one. Whilst the vocals and tone are all in keeping with the spookier end of the psychedelic or proto-prog scene at the time, the guitar parts consist of metal riffing which I'd be surprised to hear from anyone other than Tony Iommi himself in 1969, and there's subtle use of synthesisers which seem to be a little advanced for 1969. The production includes some evocative-sounding tape crackle, but it can't quite disguise some decidedly 1980s or 1990s textures in the synths. At most, this might be a reconstruction of something Jacula put out in 1969, but I highly doubt that it was actually recorded and released then.

Specifically, the album feels to me like it's halfway between a demo tape (though a reasonably competently produced one) and the sort of meandering improvisational jam releases you saw in the psychedelic and Krautrock scenes of the era. The musical approach involves long, almost ambient stretches of church organ backed with occasional bursts of riffing and rare intonations of sinister Latin phrases. Like the first Tangerine Dream album it's perhaps better approached as spooky, psychedelic-leaning proto-prog background music than as a set of fully developed compositions, but the atmosphere of doom and dread evoked here is so different from what most bands producing this sort of jam album was going for, and the musical approach is very different from the approach taken by the doom-and-gloom brigade in the 1960s and 1970s, making it a uniquely odd work.