siLLy puPPy COVEN returned a bit to its Satanic rock origins of its debut “Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls” as evidenced by the devil playing the violin on the album cover however COVEN’s third and final album BLOOD ON THE SNOW which came out in 1974, three years after its self-titled sophomore album only hinted at the occult themes of the 1969 debut which featured a complete recorded black mass along with an a gatefold spread on the original vinyl that featured a weird occult ritual. It seems the band simply invented occult rock and then got cold feet but then wanted to revisit those days without fully committing. The result is that BLOOD ON THE SNOW is a combo of the band’s first two albums.

The first obvious different on BLOOD ON THE SNOW comes in the form of a slicker production job courtesty of Shel Talmy who worked with The Who. While the musicians provide the same hard and folk rock instrumentation, the tracks offer a more symphonic backing with all those tricks you can accomplish with a more advanced mixing job. COVEN proved a potential marketability with their cover of the song “One Tin Soldier” which was featured on the film soundtrack for “Billy Jack” and cracked the US top 40 singles hits however despite the attempts to follow in these commercial footsteps however once again the band sounds a bit dated offering a more polished 60s bluesy country rock sound than something contemporary.

Once again the star of the show is the eccentric vocal style of Esther “Jinx” Dawson whose vocal range was impressive. Also guitarist Christopher Neilsen also shares lead vocals resurrecting the flashback to the 60s psychedelic rock of Quicksilver Messenger Service however this time around there’s a greater emphasis on the Elton John style piano parts which gets this album tagged as piano rock by some sources. The album also featured a guest saxophonist and a few conga parts. While the album is more focused than the self-titled predecessor, this one also jumps around from pop piano rock to hard rock, blues rock and kitschy over-produced pop. Whereas the previous albums had catchy melodies that you could grasp onto, this one feels more forced however once again nothing is really bad once you adapt to the stylistic shift.

While the musical side of the equation was clearly geared towards marketability, on the lyrics side that’s where the band revisited its occult past with bizarre cryptic references and a gatefold spread that featured the the band in full Halloween regalia. The song “Blue Blue Ship” displays lyrics that suggest Dawson has already passed away and is left haunting the world from another realm. Despite the attempt the occult themes, the musical deliveries are more on the jocular side with honky tonk piano rolls, countrified slide guitars, easy on the ears blues rock grooves and Dawson sounding as if she had just enough to drink at a party and having the time of her life. The band seemed to throw caution to the wind following a hit single and in the process lost the gamble in following up the momentum created by spawning a hit.

In many ways this album sounds a lot better than the previous ones. The pop songs are more consistent, there are no lame filler songs (i’m talkin’ bout you “Jailhouse Rock”) and the musicians seem more confident and competent this time around however on the flip side none of these tracks are as memorable either as the first two albums featured some better songwriting skills that stood out. This one is more formulaic albeit with a much slicker production job. Once again Dawson shows she can do her best Grace Slick turned Janis Joplin at the drop of the hat but this album as with all album only gives one the impression that this band was highly misdirected and had so much more potential than they ever were allowed to capture. If you ask me, COVEN is the perfect example of a talented band that was dumbed down by the record labels to exploit. This is a good album but by no means one of the seminal releases of 1974. In the battle of COVEN vs Satan, looks like COVEN lost.

siLLy puPPy After the Chicago based COVEN unleashed the mother of all occult rock records just as the 1960s were ending with its debut album “Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Sous,” the band disappeared for a couple years before reinventing itself a more straight forward pop rock band. Most of this was due to an article published in Esquire magazine which was titled “Evil Lurks In California” which wrongly associated the entire counterculture to the Charles Manson murders. Apparently the subject of Satanism that found an entire recorded Satanic black mass tagged onto the end of COVEN’s debut was more than the god-fearing public could stomach and the band received a lot of backlash.

Rather than simply disappearing forever, COVEN underwent a new branding of sort and completely distanced themselves from witchcraft imagery. COVEN released its eponymously titled album signifying a new beginning and this followup came out in 1971. In many ways the album symbolized the ultimate selling your soul to Satan thing which is the fate of many who seek fame and fortune which is symbolized by the faceless / soulless representations of the band members on the album cover along with a black cat that displays only one eye open (the all seeing eye). The band pretty much jettisoned all the overt occultism and opted for more subtle references with music that was more of a hangover from the 1960s than anything cutting edge art nouveau for 1971.

COVEN was a talented band in crafting instantly catchy pop songs based on blues rock motifs steeped in 60s hard psych charm. Lead singer Esther “Jinx” Dawson showcases her extraordinary vocal abilities more freely on this sophomore release as she retains her Grace Slick 2.0 style of ballsy West Coast heavy psych complete with blood curdling screams and Janis Joplin inspired bravado. While this formula of West coast bluesy acid rock and gritty diva deliveries appears at first to be the winning formula for COVEN’s success, the problem is with this album is that it never really latches onto any particular formula and feels like it is grasping for straws.

The album is most famous for spawning COVEN’s only top 40 hit “One Tin Soldier” which musically speaking was the best track they ever recorded. This instantly catchy song recounted a tale of two neighboring tribes that finds the war-mongering Valley People conquering the peaceful Mountain Kingdom. This track was not an original at all but a cover from the Canadian pop group The Original Caste and ironically the track was first released by that group in 1969, the year of COVEN’s debut album. The COVEN version of the song was featured on the soundtrack of the film “Billy Jack” which had a plot similar to “One Tin Soldier’s” lyrics.

While competent in delivering decent pop-infused heavy psych with a 60s zeitgeist and a stray top 40 hit that these musicians would never repeat, this self-titled sophomore release is fairly uneven in its style and consistency. For example, Jinx Dawson provides the lead female vocals but guitarist Christopher Nelson sings on quite a few of the tracks with Dawson taking on the role of backing vocalist and in the process sounding more like Quicksilver Messenger Service than Jefferson Airplane. The uninspiring Elvis Presley cover of “Jailhouse Rock” is the ultimate filler track on this one. Whereas the rest of the album retains a retro late 60s West Coast psychedelic rock feel, this track from the 1950s flails and as it was placed smack dab in the middle of the album derails the consistency.

In the end this COVEN album is saved by strong songwriting and a more energetic delivery of instrumentation which found more ambitious lead guitars, excellent piano rolls and a more diverse delivery of percussion and the top 40 hit “One Tin Soldier” was a brilliant song and a great choice to cover however that song sounds unlike anything else on this album is a fish out of water thus ending the album on a head-scratching note. The moral of the story is that even selling your soul to Satan is no guarantee for musical talent and financial success. COVEN would return with the Satanic imagery in 1974 with the ill-fated “Blood On The Snow” but the world moved on and COVEN would become utterly irrelevant once its one and only top 40 hit fell off the charts. This album is better than its reputation leads to believe but nothing spectacular either.

siLLy puPPy The history of evil as the subject matter of music stems all the way back to sounds of the violin in classical music and eventually the term was attributed to all of jazz music for its ability to interfere with the orthodoxies of the established musical paradigm so it’s no surprise that evil themes and deviant sounds would find their way into the rock world only a decade after the genre’s nascent birth pangs. The first sign of evil themes in music was the appearance of Aleister Crowley on The Beatles’ landmark “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club” which opened the flood gates for not only more experimental musical ideas that led to more progressive forms of rock music but apparently also gave permission for artists to dabble into the more occult themes that had hitherto been eschewed in lieu of feel good pop culture or psychedelic escapist dreams as the late 60s came into its own.

Black Sabbath is rightly acknowledged for giving birth to the whole doom fueled darkness that would blossom into the greater heavy metal universe but the English band wasn’t the first rock band to delve into the darker world of the occult. That honor wouldn’t emerge on British soil at all but rather in Chicago, USA and initiated by the band COVEN who in 1969 debuted many themes and attributes that would become synonymous with metal despite actually being a psychedelic acid rock band that sounded more like Jefferson Airplane than Sabbath, Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple. The band boldly dropped their debut occult themed debut on an unsuspecting public in the form of WITCHCRAFT DESTROYS MINDS AND REAPS SOULS in 1969, the year before Black Sabbath debuted their own darkened themes set to music. Add to that, COVEN invented the metal salute of the sign of horns, displayed inverted crosses and reveled in the phrase “Hail Satan.”

The band was the creation of lead vocalist Jinx Dawson and bassist Oz Osbourne who were in a previous band named Him, Her and Them and after hooking up with drummer Steve Ross, COVEN was born in 1967 and paid their dues by playing alongside late 60s acts like the Yardbirds, early Alice Cooper and Vanilla Fudge. The band’s overt occult symbology and lyrical content naturally generated much controversy and caught the attention of Mercury Records who was eager to cash in on the growing popularity and enthusiasm towards the occult that was sweeping the world. Despite the interest in this sort of underground rock as it was called, the album was quickly removed from the market after its release but became a cult classic due to its completely unapologetic use of occult characteristics that would soon be adopted in the world of hard rock and heavy metal.

Despite the wickedly evil themes and lyrical content that deals with the expected themes of witchcraft, Satanic worship and other occult subject matter, the album is actually characterized by a rather standard psychedelic pop rock sound that most closely resembles the West Coast psychedelic rock that was made popular by Jefferson Airplane. Even Jinx Dawson’s vocal style and phrasing emanates the great Grace Slick with the sultry feminine bravado and charismatic drive that caught everyone’s attention. The first eight tracks on WITCHCRAFT DESTROYS MINDS AND REAPS SOULS were characterized by a heavy psych sound that was found Dawson backed by heavy distorted guitars, bass, drums and the classic 60s organ sound. Despite the actual songs’ lyrical themes, it’s perhaps the final track that got the album banned and that which made it stand out from any other release in recording history. Track ten titled “Satanic Mass” concluded the album with a bona fide 13 minute black mass which displayed ritualistic chanting, chimes and Satanic prayers.

Ultimately the band was unjustly associated with the murders of Charles Manson and other deviant behavior of the time and was also lumped into the entire counterculture as a scapegoat for antiestablishment behaviors. Ironically the album’s first track is titled “Black Sabbath” which may or may not have inspired England’s godfathers of the metal universe with their debut album that emerged the next year but it does reflect upon the unveiling of the occult world that had never found its way into popular music. Ultimately COVEN’s debut is more of a curiosity than a bona fide outstanding album. The music itself is well performed but nothing out of the ordinary for the 60s and definitely not the best the era had to offer and while the ending “Satanic Mass” is an interesting aberrance from the status quo, it really isn’t that interesting and utterly a waste of time after a single listen. COVEN will remain in the history books indeed for initiating the first signs of Satan in popular music but i rather doubt that anyone will remember them for the music itself.

Warthur The decision to include a 13 minute spoken word rendition of a "Satanic Mass" (blatantly play-acted and cobbled together from diverse sources, including Anton LaVey's own tedious brand of commercialised Hollywood Satanism and Dennis Wheatley novels) perhaps overshadows any other aspect of Coven's debut album. The fact is that whilst its inclusion was controversial enough at the time to get some temporary publicity for the band, the album's reputation has suffered in retrospect for the inclusion of 13 minutes of embarrassing and often tedious Satanic ritual which goes absolutely nowhere.

It's a crying shame, because if you actually ignore the last track there's some solid psychedelic rock with progressive moments on this album. Thematically more reminiscent of Dennis Wheatley and Hammer Horror movies than anything more sinister, the tame Satanism offered here would look wimpy next to even the (still quite cartoonish) antics of Venom or Mercyful Fate in the 1980s, let alone the extremes the black metal scene would reach in the 1990s, but it does offer a precedent for acts such as Blood Ceremony, Uncle Acid and even Electric Wizard, with Blood Ceremony in particular coming close to the Coven sound in their more psychedelic moments. But at the same time, we can't pretend that the band didn't offer up an album with an unforgivably high proportion of filler in the form of the Mass. Three stars seems fair.

Bmiler I always found this album rather underrated. OK, from a metal standpoint, I should probably give this a two star rating, as it isn't particularly metal. But I enjoy the album still the same. Just because it has Satanic themes doesn't automatically make it metal. But there's two strange coincidences on this album. The bassist is named Oz Osborne, and the opening song is called "Black Sabbath", which has nothing to do with the British band in any way, shape or form (or the song "Black Sabbath" from Sabbath's debut). It's doubtful the Coven album ever made it in the UK, so I can't imagine Ozzy Osbourne owning a copy of Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls. What you have here is psychedelic rock that's not miles away from Jefferson Airplane. Replace hippie themes with a Satanic theme, and that's what you have here. Jinx Dawson sounds something like a more evil Grace Slick. I really like Jinx's voice, and if any of you are wondering, this is the same group, two years later, who scored an AM hit with "One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)". The Witchraft album gets some songwriting help from two members of Aorta, Jim Nyholt, and James Vincent aka Jim Donlinger. It's a bit strange that James Vincent would agree to write material for this album given he's Christian. Anyways, there are many songs I really like here, including "Black Sabbath", "Coven in Charing Cross" (which features some sinister chanting), the jazzy "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", "Choke, Thirst, Die", and "Wicked Woman". Then at the end you get treated with a Satanic Mass, in which a priest initiates a lady (presumably Jinx Dawson) and I get a kick off how the priest demands, in a very angry tone of voice, to "Kiss the goat".

Like Black Widow's Sacrifice, this album was a center of controversy. A scandalous article in the March 1970 issue of Esquire Magazine called Evil Lurks in California mentions Charles Manson, as well as this album in the same article. Mercury Records aware of this article, not wanting further negative publicity, pulled this album out of circulation.

I guess the reason this band is included here, is much the same Black Widow is included here, the occult themes had a big impact on many metal acts to come even if this isn't particularly metal. And on this album there's that Black Sabbath speculation one can talk about until their face turns blue.

So if you don't mind venturing out of metal, and you fancy the idea of Jefferson Airplane-like psychedelic with a Satanic twist, give this a try.