Warthur 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.

Warthur Though the choice of title does needlessly muddle the Black Widow discography (there's a self-titled Black Widow album, a Black Widow III, but no Black Widow II!), this third album from the group does at least find them settling on a new musical direction after they more or less entirely abandoned the approach of their breakthrough debut album, Sacrifice, in the wake of massive controversy surrounding its Satanic themes and their ritualistic live show. Their first self-titled album found them casting about a bit in search of a new direction; here, they seem to have found it.

Essentially, whilst their earliest work (under the name of Pesky Gee) saw them taking extensive inspiration from This Was/Stand Up-era Jethro Tull, right about the time when Tull themselves were about to shift away from that approach, this album finds them drawing extensively on the Yes sound circa 1970-1971; sure, their sound is a little rougher, they don't have that distinctive Chris Squire bass sound, and though the contributions of Clive Jones they feature flute and saxophone more extensively. But just listen to the opening of The Battle and tell me with a straight face that doesn't remind you strongly of the opening to Yours Is No Disgrace - you can't do it, can you?

In some respects it's a bit of a shame to hear Black Widow once again jumping on the bandwagon of larger progressive acts in the hopes of snagging a wider audience, especially when their most famous album, Sacrifice, had a much more original approach. On the other hand, this is far from a bland and unimaginative cloning of the Yes sound - it comes across more like they've had The Yes Album on heavy rotation and they've absorbed its musical lessons into their own structure.

If you come to this expecting another Sacrifice, you'll be disappointed, because Black Widow never really went back to that creative well - and that is, I admit, a shame. Nonetheless, if you really enjoy early Yes, and want to hear a folk-psych inflected take on it by musicians who were contemporaries of Yes rather than latter-day retro-prog nostalgia merchants, Black Widow III is pretty good - in retrospect, surprisingly good for a band who were hurtling towards disintegration at the time of its release.

Warthur Black Widow's second album finds them dialling back the psychedelic and occult influences on their sound, yielding a sort of bluesy proto-prog approach. Opening number Tears and Wine, for instance, lands particularly close to the sound Audience had circa House On the Hill when it comes to finding comparisons on the wider scene, particularly on the opening Tears and Wine; other moments, like The Journey or Poser, suggest the influence of early Deep Purple. Zoot Taylor's organ and piano contributions and Clive Jones' interjections on flute and sax make sure that there's a touch of psych-prog still in play, but it's certainly less original and distinctive than their debut album, Sacrifice.

This may have boded ill for Black Widow going forwards, lending credence to the perception that once they moved away from their eye-catching early concept there wasn't that much to them, and certainly there's a touch of the "transitional album" here. On the plus side, this does mean that the sound is fairly varied; on the downside, it'll be a rare listener that loves all of these tunes equally. The Gypsy, for instance is a mostly-acoustic number save for a volcanic electric guitar solo, which isn't quite a novelty song but feels like it's at risk of going in that direction at any moment.

There's flashes of a potentially new vision here and there; Mary Clark, in particular, comes across especially well, though there's a caveat here - it's actually a left-over song from the Sacrifice sessions, the earlier version of which was left off the album because it didn't fit the concept, and so the update here is more of a flash of the genius which once animated the band rather than the light at the end of the tunnel for their creative crisis.

Had Black Widow swiftly found a strong new creative vision to pursue after moving on from the style of Sacrifice, perhaps their history would have been different. As it stands, it's easy to see how at the time the album didn't quite hit the mark - anyone keen for the Sacrifice approach would have felt disappointed, anyone open to a new direction might regard what they're playing here as rather similar to what a lot of progressive groups were doing at the time. In retrospect, it's not half bad, with The Journey and Mark Clark being particular highlights, but it's unsurprising it got lost in the shuffle. One for those who particularly like the sound of the more Deep Purple-ish end of proto-prog.

Warthur This is the third of the three distinct ways you can take in Black Widow's debut concept album, Sacrifice. The first-released, second-recorded one is, of course, the Sacrifice album itself; second-released but earlier-recorded was Return To the Sabbat, the demo version of the album which included Kay Garret on vocals before she left the band which was finally saw an official release in 1997.

This was recorded the last of all the three, and released the last - being a live show from the Sacrifice tour. It seems like Black Widow's live show at this time basically consisted of playing the entire Sacrifice album, which nmakes sense because even though they had a previous existence as Pesky Gee, the Exclamation Mark album didn't exactly have many classic tracks on it aside from the cover versions of work by much bigger acts.

However, the live show expanded on the Sacrifice concept, working in masses of theatrical flair and, in particular, focusing on adding in more ritualistic elements that give the performance the air of an actual occult gathering, and pehraps qualifies this as the best version of the complete narrative.

Warthur Black Widow's Sacrifice offers a potent and sinister concept, but it took a while for it to grow on me. If you're going for an unambiguously horror-oriented story with lots and lots of spooky atmosphere, it's not going to quite work for you - there's this sort of air of witchy sensuality and magical romance running through it which leads to a more complex and nuanced emotional palette than you might expect from the concept, though admittedly the material doesn't always get this across very effectively. Return to the Sabbat, which collects the demo version of the album, manages to deliver a spookier experience simply by keeping it sinister and lo-fi; the live rendition of the album offered on Demons of the Night Gather To See Black Widow Live expands on the concept by capturing some of the ritualistic aspects of the band's presentation of the concept. Still, I quite appreciate their commitment to the bit here, even if the vision presented here is more bluesy and soulful than their hardcore Hammer Horror concept may lead you to expect.