Capricorn by Orchid

With an evil-looking goat’s head gracing the album cover, it’s no surprise that San Francisco heavy doom-rock band Orchid’s 2011 album Capricorn opens with weighty riffage and heavily reverberated, high-pitched vocals that sound more like Pentagram than Witchcraft’s admirable attempts. “Eyes Behind the Wall” opens on an early Sabbath blueprint — guitarist Mark Thomas Baker plays like he was schooled by Tony Iommi, especially in the solo (which is comparable to the epic bridge on “Into the Void” from 1971’s Master of Reality. Although singer Theo Mindell will inevitably garner many a comparison to early Ozzy, his range is actually more dynamic, treading into higher registers on the hard-driving “Black Funeral” than Ozzy could inflect before dipping down into a throaty tenor on the simmering “He Who Walks Alone,” where Baker’s riffs roll into Sleep territory — but where their celebrated 1992 album Holy Mountain recreates a bygone sound, Orchid challenge themselves to reinvent it with strange arrangements and well-crafted songs with memorable melodies. ℗ 2011 The Church Within