Magic Acid - The Cellar of the Evil Jinn

 

 

Magic Acid - The Cellar of the Evil Jinn
Self-released - 2025
Doom, Stoner, Blues
Rated: ****¼

Magic Acid is a band from Moscow that lays down those traditional instrumental doom grooves, while adding a touch of blues for good measure. 'The Cellar of the Evil Jinn' is their debut album and the intro of the title song that opens it throws me back to the good old times when Abdullah released their first album. That slow, minimalistic passage with a bluesy twang. But it doesn't take long before a full on, frontal attack of fuzz comes barging in through the walls of the wooden shack you imagined you were relaxing in. A whirlwind of sonic debris shattered across the room, fire from burning logs that where once the foundation on which your cozy little hiding place was built upon surrounding you, suffocating every living creature in close proximity - you. The raw energy displayed here is the focal point of Magic Acid's music, both when they build a deadly wall of sound and when they open up the sky to let some dark and soothing passages control your delayed moves, echoing through every muscle and blood vessel your body somehow manages to preserve.

The epic 'The Power of Buzz' for example is exactly that - a swarm of giant, man-sized bees moving in slow motion, producing a scary, elongated, repetitive, rumbling noise that somehow turns the world upside down in stinging fashion, while 'March Dolboebov' indeed follows a certain scheme, but not one that forces people to march to their death while blindfolded by indoctrination. No, it's got some kind of dragged-out zombie swing that brings the deceased back to life while making you wonder if that's something to cheer about or be scared of when you see the undead wandering through the streets of temptation in bloody, skeletal fashion, limbs moving awkwardly, skin hanging from bones.

'Heavy of Libations' on the other hand is so hazy at times, it hands you a VIP seat on Icarus' wings for a journey to the sun - with falling down to earth being nothing more than a meandering dream constituted of metaphysical thoughts. And talking about lifting things up: album closer 'The End of the Drip' is by far the most uplifting track of them all. It's the shortest and fastest one of the bunch, like it wants to say the trip doesn't end here - it's merely a confirmation that the slow penetration of auditory fluids has caused enough erosion to the bubble surrounding you, so the gates are able to open entirely with a loud creak, making room for a flood of crunchy riffs bound to wake you up from the dreamlike mindstate you've been wallowing in for the past 50 minutes. It's an unexpected, but fitting end to a seven track album that pulls at the heartstrings of doom from various angles, using an experimental, out of the box take on traditional blues as an undercurrent; a distant guideline to locate miscellaneous dots in an abstract universe.

(Written by Ronny Dijksterhuis)

Bandcamp

Band Link